While it's possible that Mohamed was an innocent contributor caught up by an internet scammer, it still sounds fishy to me.  To go from less than $100 in three years to $700 in a month with the same portfolio by getting lots of ELs and high-value SODs by only providing a small payment and a link to your portfolio seems highly unlikely.  How does the scammer make their money?  How much were they paid?  What kind of contract did you sign?  Were you supposed to pay them a percentage of future profits?  Who is the scammer, exactly?  I don't see why anyone would run a scam like this - it makes no sense how they can make money at it if you only paid them a little bit upfront.  Clearly whatever they did resulted in lots of increased sales.  If it was possible to do that solely by increased advertizing then everybody would be doing it.  If it was a personal vendetta and all they needed was a portfolio link, they wouldn't need to contact you for that.  The whole thing makes no sense.

Mohamed, as you can see the people here tend to be very skeptical and many have analytical minds that will try to figure out exactly what is going on - both to try to help you sort it out and also to protect themselves and others from the same type of scam.  If you really want to get to the bottom of it, please provide more detailed information - any e-mails from the scammer and your responses, exactly what was said, promised and paid.  My prediction is that if we see the whole communication thread then the situation will not be as innocent as it seems, but the only way to know for certain is to see the whole story.  Full disclosure is the key to exoneration.  Or not.

And in the future, remember that old adage already mentioned by others, "anything that sounds too good to be true, probably is".

The OP may, of course, be blameless, but just think about this from the scammer's point of view. First, the scam must have included getting away with a significant portion of the download earnings - use a stolen card to buy a lot of stuff and get away with the payments before the credit card is refused. So either they are in league with the contributor or they have access to his Paypal account. Is there another way to make money on this scam?

Then this scammer must be pretty new at the game because they didn't seem to know that SS waits a month before paying out and most credit card fraud is detected in days, or hours, so the chance of a payout before the payments are questioned is very small. Seems a pretty poorly organized scammer if that was the plan. Then, no-one thought about SS having fraud controls of their own - like a massive run of EDs on an account that has been a very low earner.

Sounds like whoever was doing this scam hadn't actually done it before! A naive beginner?

Quote from: mohamed on December 29, 2017, 23:19

When you start your own business it is like your son,

Please promise your future children (daughters also matter) that you will not under any circumstances allow them to be looked after by some random stranger who approaches you in person or online and offers to look after them.

You put your hand on the wound
I have behaved really reckless behavior, I hope this is the end of trouble

Quote from: qunamax on December 25, 2017, 06:18

Quote from: niktol on December 25, 2017, 05:00

Quote from: qunamax on December 25, 2017, 04:54

Well it might be, maybe somehow they detected something fishy going on with your mac adresses and it raised a red flag for them, so they just disabled the account. I doubt they even elaborated, they just play safe and don't have time to investigate every such event, hence the paragraph in their tos about account disabling with no questions asked. I think...

Sent from my SM-J510FN using Tapatalk

As far as I know mac addresses aren't communicated unless there is an app installed on the client mac. Do mac users have to download an app from SS to communicate with the site? If it's just through browser, unless it's IE supposedly there isn't anything providing SS with this info.

You are right. I thought it's not usually done but possible to extract mac if wanted.

Is it important?
Is this possibly the reason for my account being disabled?

I'm not suggesting that them extracting the mac address has anything to do with that but, why would you change it? I'm suggesting that if you're going through the trouble to change that, you're probably going through the trouble to use a proxy server or any other number of confusing questionable actions as well.

As for what you should do in the future, just create new profiles at other sites (shutterstock will close it again if they find out it's you) and share your stuff the way the rest of us do. It's really that easy ... No "marketer" is just going to show up one day and increase sales 1000% but, if you just share your new files and new sales and whatever sometimes you'll catch an extra customer or two from your followers. It seems like most of them have a way to pretty much share them automatically ... if not try IFTTT or something.

Good luck, don't cheat the system too badly.

Is there another way to make money on this scam?

Getting the OP to pay them!

Quote from: mohamed on December 25, 2017, 20:06

Quote from: qunamax on December 25, 2017, 06:18

Quote from: niktol on December 25, 2017, 05:00

Quote from: qunamax on December 25, 2017, 04:54

Well it might be, maybe somehow they detected something fishy going on with your mac adresses and it raised a red flag for them, so they just disabled the account. I doubt they even elaborated, they just play safe and don't have time to investigate every such event, hence the paragraph in their tos about account disabling with no questions asked. I think...

Sent from my SM-J510FN using Tapatalk

As far as I know mac addresses aren't communicated unless there is an app installed on the client mac. Do mac users have to download an app from SS to communicate with the site? If it's just through browser, unless it's IE supposedly there isn't anything providing SS with this info.

You are right. I thought it's not usually done but possible to extract mac if wanted.

Is it important?
Is this possibly the reason for my account being disabled?

I'm not suggesting that them extracting the mac address has anything to do with that but, why would you change it? I'm suggesting that if you're going through the trouble to change that, you're probably going through the trouble to use a proxy server or any other number of confusing questionable actions as well.

As for what you should do in the future, just create new profiles at other sites (shutterstock will close it again if they find out it's you) and share your stuff the way the rest of us do. It's really that easy ... No "marketer" is just going to show up one day and increase sales 1000% but, if you just share your new files and new sales and whatever sometimes you'll catch an extra customer or two from your followers. It seems like most of them have a way to pretty much share them automatically ... if not try IFTTT or something.

Good luck, don't cheat the system too badly.

Eventually the my pen's tooth has broken
But do not worry about that, that will not push me to suicide or join to ISIS

There is a wisdom that says who make the miracle once he can make more
And another wisdom says not to cry over spilled milk
...
The sun will shine tomorrow, just should to wait

But also let me to admit that I was reckless in dealing with someone I did not know
Thanks for all Happy New Year
                  I am sorry for my English

I know this isn't necessarily what happened here but as a related FYI, Shutterstock does have many ways of detecting suspicious activity and will close accounts without warning. I started out on SS as a vector contributor but later wanted to purchase a subscription to license photos for various design projects. I reached out to SS about it just to make sure I wasn't crossing any lines by being a contributor and a buyer at the same time. They warned me then that if I used my subscription to download any of my own images, my account would be closed.

They take this stuff very seriously. There's too much real fraud going on every day, so their zero-tolerance policy may seem harsh but it is there for a reason.

When in doubt about anything you're doing, just reach out to them and ask before you do something that could jeopardize your account. SS is very willing to answer questions before you do anything risky, but they won't be forgiving if you just go ahead with some scheme to increase sales without checking with them first to see if it's ok to do.