Contest Photo - My Best Fall Shot?
 

2013 Update: See second post below.

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EDITED: This post is spam, and has been edited by the admin. I've left it up for the benefit of Google, but removed the links.

From what I can tell, Viewbug.com is a scam. It looks to be another typical type of photo scam that has existed for years and years, far before the Internet had even come along. The site looks nice, even claims to have winners that were paid cash -- but I've yet to meet an actual person who has won anything from this.

Many modern photo scams usually try to steal your photos, and sell them to stock companies without your permission. In years past, photography scammers would pretend that you were a winner, then do their best to collect personal information or funds for whatever reason. These days, ID theft is still popular. I don't know how they claim to pay you, but I wouldn't be surprised if they asked for bank details.

The Viewbug spams come out of India according to an IP trace, and appears to operate from a webserver known to send craploads of spam.

Even if it is semi-legitimate, the Viewbug owners appear to be spammers. I would imagine that you're more or less guaranteed to receive spam for pills, porn, etc. They whore themselves on many forums or blogs, so why would your personal e-mail account be any different? Run a Google search, and tell me how many non-spam results you see -- few to none, that's how many! (And the ones that aren't spam are just published "press releases". I use the term loosely, since they appears to originate from the for-pay PRweb service.) They've spammed this site 2-3 times now, and past posts were were all deleted, both message and user. This time, I've left it, with this kind message added to it.

Their SEO-serving splogs are located at picturescontest.com and inphotoblog.com -- legitimate "on the level" companies don't splog. Splog = spam blog, for the uninitiated. There are probably more, too -- I'm only aware of the two. They use Facebook as another splog -- their is no actual Facebook participation.

As a long-time photographer, people like this just piss me off. :mad:
Dear Viewbug, stay the hell off our forum.

--admin


The original spam post (sans links):
Today is also December 1. You wanted uploads finished by yesterday? What kind of stupid BS is that?

It appears somebody else bought the site and turned it legit. :eek:

What a difference 4 years makes! It's no longer run by Indian spammers, and appears to be on the level now.
Wow ... very nice. Good to see some change for the better, for once.