An Internet search for an e-book led me to Baydownloads.com today. The site had a catalog of downloads for ebooks, applications, movies and music which looked legitimate. The site required registration and payment of a small fee, $4.87, to gain access for a three-day trial, by providing credit card details to a secure (https) page.
Immediately after the transaction was approved, the site jumped a pornography website offering sex videos - no mention of this had previously appeared. The receipt said I had been registered to a website called Megadownloadpass - not to Baydownloads - and that the $4.87 payment would "recur" as $39.73 every 30 days.
I returned to Baydownloads.com where I was refused access to the ebook I was seeking because I was "not logged in as a member, " although a panel on the left clearly said "Logged in, click here to logout."
Realising this was probably a scam, I typed a nonsense word into the Baydownloads search box and the site reported that it had this non-existent file on the servers.
I did some research and found that Baydowbloads had been reported on several forums as fraudulent. Furthermore, its "customer help service, " Customersupporthelp.com, is run by a company called Prolast based in Nicosia Cyprus, which has also been reported by Internet users for fraud.
I quickly emailed support@customersupporthelp and ordered the immediate cancellation of my registration and refund of the fee, and threatened to file a complaint about Baydownloads and Prolast with both US federal and Cyprus law enforcement. I have received no reply so far.
Since these interlinked sites are clearly fraudulent pron vendors, I was forced to immediately cancel my credit card. The bank told me that within the ten minutes or so that it took me to realise I had been scammed, several charges had been totalling around $16 had been made by an entity called "client-aid.com".
This is an insidious and dangerous scam that exposes a user's credit card to immediate and recurring theft. Baydownloads appears among several lists of legitimate downloading services online without any warning being posted.
The site looks professional and legitimate and only after filling in the credit card form for the small registarion fee is the user confronted with blatant pornograghy - and the realization that his or her credit card information is in the hands of crooks.
Thamus
Fairfax, Virginia
U.S.A.
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