Recently I was approached by a person who linked me to a website that some of you might have heard of. I was told that they were using our images and hotlinking them too. Wondering what it was that he had "borrowed" I joined their site.
I have never been so angry in my life.
I'm going to hide the images under a "read now" because there are a lot of them.
First thing I saw was this:
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On the left is their GH on the right is an image of our GH. Yes, that is their URL that is linked there as proof of where I found it. That image on the right is the GH image which one of our members worked for weeks to draw. Weeks. This is an image he has taken and claimed as his own.
Then I decided to check some stores and saw this:
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The image on the top is from that site. Notice that the stores look almost the same, even down to the description. This is because they not only stole our images, they stole the code too and hotlinked. On the righ is the original post made by former member William Colt. He worked his arse off for days making each and every single one of those pet images and this guy has come along and stolen them.
Also, here is a screen of their code with our links and images on it.
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Other images I saw which they "borrowed".
This is our store on LA
Notice the food and things available there.
Now look at this:
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This is their version of the same store. Images are the same, layout is the same.
To add insult to injury, he, the site owner, claims to have made these images.
I had to get one of the scripters to fix the site so that all images hotlinked from LA was turned into a watermark.
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When that happened, we thought it was over. His account was banned from LA and any account associated with it was banned along with it.
Unfortunately, he had uploaded all his stolen images to another site and has now stopped hotlinking them. Which means he has now stolen our images and, to make matters worse, is making money from our images.
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So, yeah.
That is our lovely little story. If you see anyone talking about this website, then please inform me so that they can be banned from the site. Currently we are in legal talks over these images since this guy refuses to give us credit and is making money from images which do not belong to him.
