All Merchants and Avatars beware

http://virtualget.net/

This site is as far as I can tell a phishing for CC info site. They have at least one of my products there, but will not be able to deliver as I have never sold any and it only exists on Xstreet.

It looks like they have harvested Xstreet photos and descriptions verbatium and without regard to any copyright issues. Trust me, they can't deliver, but creators, do check out the site to see if your items have been harvested.


DO NOT give them CC info or open an account.

I have found 7 of my own currently on the site as well......I have sent support tickets to xstreet, second life and to the hosting company of the site (that we think we found out)....
http://www.realitychecknetwork.com/

It's no wonder it's a phishing site, look at the name. virtualget? Pretty immediate clue right there just from their address.

They now say:

Registrations have been temporarily suspended due to members signing up during our development phase.

The products on this site have been loaded for visualization purposes only. Please contact [email]support@virtualget.net[/email] for more information.

To all product developers and creators: we apologize for using your content on this site. Rest assured, we have not sold ANY of your products.

We appreciate the traffic, but please wait until the site is launched before making press releases.
- The Administrators of VirtualGet

Anyone who finds their content on the site can and should do a DMCA with the site host. These guys don't seem to get the thing about needing permission to use someone's copyrighted content.

They have no products, only our text and descriptions. Xstreet & LL have the real teeth here as they do not post the standard disclaimers anywhere on the site.

I'll be watching carefully as one of my prefabs is shown on the site.

Updated from the site:


Registrations have been temporarily suspended due to members signing up during our development phase.

The products on this site have been loaded for visualization purposes only. Please contact [email]support@virtualget.net[/email] (update: the mx server was not even setup for emails, we appologize, it now works) for more information or to have products removed.

To all product developers and creators: we apologize for using your content on this site, it was added via a crawler to populate the site. Rest assured, we have not sold ANY of your products.

We appreciate the traffic, but please wait until the site is launched before making press releases.
- The Administrators of VirtualGet

I don't know what standard disclaimers you mean, nor why they might need them at this point in their development.

They have photos, for which the product creator presumably owns the copyright. Even the textual descriptions might have copyright protection if they're creative enough. This suggests it's the content creators and not LL who may have the clout.

On the other hand, it looks like they're trying to build a competitor to xstreet, but don't understand either the legalities or the technicalities of testing and deployment. But if there intention is to provide an alternative, beating them over the head because of copyright infringement is the wrong approach. Educating them is the right approach.

Well, LL's legal team will point out to the site that the use of Second Life on any of their pages must be cited correctly.

i.e. http://virtualget.net/p3/Shipping-Policy/pages.html

Should read : Second Life®

If this site has ties to Second Life®, they have just made a major boo-boo

http://secondlife.com/corporate/brand/trademark/

http://secondlife.com/corporate/brand/trademark/unauthorized.php


Notice and Disclaimer. If you're promoting a business or organization, product or service, or publication, work, or event related to the Second Life world, include in your promotional materials a reasonably prominent trademark notice and disclaimer. For example, "Second Life is a trademark of Linden Research, Inc. Savvy Software Development, Inc. is not affiliated with or sponsored by Linden Research."

Brilliant!

When building a website like this, it's common early in the development stage, to go out and find a similar site, and snag a bunch of pictures and text. It's not intended that the items will ever be sold.. it's just "some relevant pictures and text" to show what the page would look like with real content.

I know that I've done similarly when building a sales site for a friend. I went out and found a random picture of some rope, and then some random text from a site selling some rope, etc etc.. Then I flowed that text into the layout we already had, and he could get a feel for how his site would look when it was really loaded with his content.

I tried using a picture of a tomato, and some "Lorem Ipsum" text, but to be honest he kept focusing on "I'm not selling tomatoes" so I had to go find pictures semi-related to what he was doing.

No, it's not right.. blah blah blah... there's IP theft, and then there's someone just tossing some pics from the web into a layout to try and figure out how to make the site work. I'm inclined to beleive their statement that no items were sold.

VirtualGet would be a great name for a XStreet competitor.

VirtualGit seems a more appropriate name at this stage.

I Do not agree,I have work for a few website development company's.A mock is done with legitimate images and text! This is a practice to get traffic from the start.They know what they are doing ,and it is wrong and ilegal.What they also know is it builds hype.Starts chatter and builds interest from venders.And they know all it will come down to is a warning.. LL should have a program for this stuff that would not just warn them ,but kill any chance of opening once they step over lines like this.Boils down to low business integrity .

i doubt i will ever use a place besides XstreetSL now.

I don't see a reason.

Adult content.

Give it 2 years.

You owe me a cup of coffee, Laval.

/me laughs. Sorry, that just struck me funny, carry on.

You do NOT create a shopping cart site by harvesting another sites wares. I have been involved in shopping carts and various cart creations since 1998 and we never used any products that we did not own the rights to display. These folks are using a very poor cart IMO that has major security leaks. OS Commerce is fraught with problems.


UPDATE From *THAT* Site.

The site is currently down for maintenance. Please excuse the dust, and try back later.
Registrations have been temporarily suspended due to members signing up during our development phase. Update: We have taken the store completely offline until we get things straigthened out. There is alot of misinformation about fraud which we would liek to address. We had 0 traffic on this site as it was for demonstration purposes only to show a client what the commerce script was capable of. Nowhere on the site were users able to put in billing information. There were 5 accounts created other than the development and system accounts and they were all created today. They have also been removed.

The products on this site have been loaded for visualization purposes only. Please contact [email]support@virtualget.net[/email] (update: the mx server was not even setup for emails, we appologize, it now works) for more information.

To all product developers and creators: we apologize for using your content on this site, it was added via a crawler to populate the site. Rest assured, we have not sold ANY of your products and do not intend to display them without your permission, it was an automated mistake.

Any complaints sent to the host of the site and the registrar have been dealt with and we apologize to anybody who came across the site during its development phase.
- The Administrators of VirtualGet

The Admin / Webmaster has enabled maintenance at : 2009-10-07 01:56:18

MY thought. I want a formal mea culpa email from these folks. We're already concerned with IP rights and Copybot and viewer bot and now they show us CARTBOT? Give me a break!

oscommerce works just fine if you know how to work with it... our fabled SLX is just oscommerce merged with phpbb ... I have stores online running oscommerce, and have started work on my own competitor to slx using oscommerce...

-----

On another note, I must laugh because right from yesterday as the whole 'OMG CC scam thing was circling SL groups and chats... I kept saying over and over bull****, it's probably a competitors site that was never ment to be open to the public and now everyone is blowing it out of proportion..... have you ever noticed the users of SL seem to blow everything way out of proportion and always assume the worse? never seen a community quite like it...

To the creators of virtualget if you happen to read, good looking site so far... but you have a loooooong way to go to turn a standard oscommerce site into something that can interact with SL on the level xstreet does.

It can't be helped. It's a Pavlovian response, the result of years of seeing LL do stuff that usually results in "the worse".

Meh.. what would you have us do with CopyBot, Nielware, and all the other IP theft stuff going on? Sit and twiddle our virtual thumbs? These folks could have made their site Private for the experiment. Fact is they were soliticing membership for a fee, had listing they lifted from Xstreet without permission and nowhere cited the place as anything but a real working shopping cart. Was your stuff there? Mine was without my permission. If I do not protect my stuff, who will? Whatever

Yeah. A long way. Hopefully they can start with not slapping their mock-up out in public where people can not only see it but join it. That would be a good start. Next time around they'll need to change their name no doubt. I don't think anybody blew it out of proportion, people are nervous right now with all the content theft. If virtualget had been more concientious, nobody would have ever seen their little experiment and none of this would have happened. Maybe next time they will be.

This.

But in the case of VirtualGet, I am inclined to believe it was an honest mistake in an ill-thought attempt to show proof-of-concept. Nothing more.

I'm not saying these guys are honest; nor am I saying they're dishonest. What I will say is that I don't know enough about them to render a judgment. If these guys come back later on with a fully-functional store, I'll watch them. If they show that they know what they're doing, have the proper credentials, have all their I's dotted and T's crossed, and can generate traffic, then I will likely list my products there. Lord knows XstreetSL is in desperate need of some competition, and if VirtualGet can bring it, then more power to them.

I'm guessing they didn't mean to have it accessible to the public and I don't think they were soliciting at all. I think the whole thing was a mistake.