Ian Taylor
London,#2UPDATE Employee
Mon, March 18, 2013
My main rebuttal point is that this is an internet business. Show me one that uses the same standards as brick-and-mortar biz. One. I bet your local news agent would love to be able to automatically bill you for the magazine you just bought when next month's issue comes out. They can't, we can, that's the 'net.
As to this particular case, the company maintains a number of internet websites that receive queries from torrent search engines ("illegal file sharing"). Our web server will respond that we have the file for immediate high speed download. We give that response NO MATTER WHAT THE QUERY. Before the user can download it though (and find out it doesn't really exist) they are required to pay for either 24 hours access, or lifetime access. We collect the lifetime fee of 50 pounds from thousands of people a day, simply by responding that "we have that file". Try our link and see. And they say money doesn't grow on trees... Companies House even lets me register my business address as a Mailboxes Plus. Totally safe, no work, no product, just collect the money. Type in something totally bogus. It will tell you that x number of people have downloaded it and at exactly what speed! Maybe that should be a bit of a hint...
We have 850 corps at last count. This is the norm. I can understand your frustration but you'll have to change the laws the govern the 'net and their enforcement. In the meantime you're expecting one website to voluntarily restrict themselves, at their cost, because it would look good. It's not going to happen. And you can start with Paypal. They have LOTS of accounts where the end user has never.once.received.anything. Much worse than us. Sites that advertise live TV and never deliver one pixel. They write impossible terms for refunds and just collect money. Paypal knows this. In just what sense is that not legal money laundering?
Bottom line, internet biz has been given a license to ill. Until that changes, we are a GOOD case.