Quote - P.S. Yes, I knew it was/is a scam but wanted to get some other worldly opinions on the subject.

???????????? A tutorial on scams ? ??????????????? :blink: ___ HUH?

Actually, you know.. that's not such a bad idea when you think about it. 

First of all, there's piracy.  Poser is rampant with it.  There are any number of servers/organizations located in hard-to-litigate countries that are either hosting files, providing peer-to-peer information or providing links to where the files have been uploaded.  There are even sites that seem legitimate and seem to be primarily hosting architectural type objects but, then you come across a repackaged mesh that was in an artist's product on Renderosity or any of the other merchant sites.  As a matter of fact, when I first was interested in Poser I naturally started going down the search engines for freebies and stumbled across many of these sites myself.  It didn't take long to figure out what was up.  Since I've been around for a year or so, identifying individual products is much easier and even if I don't buy the product, I can generally recognize it or its probable mesh if I see a good pic of it somewhere it isn't supposed to be.

These sites and organizations are committing theft.  They're stealing products whos creators worked very hard to produce.  They're stealing revenue from the merchant sites as well or, at the very least, promoting both activities.  It's not only illegal, it's just plain wrong.

But, now and again, I see someone new to Poser post a link to a scam site either informing people of their "great new freebie motherload find!" or asking whether or not it is legitimate.   They don't know any better.. nobody is actually telling them "How" to know better. 

Then, there's the sites that seem to want to package malware in these products or other ones related to Poser.  Why?  Because, to be honest, most Poser users aren't comp-tech-internet-savvy people.  They know how to surf but not how to protect themselves and, they get bitten..  Not many people are very aware of the dangers of downloading.  After all, Poser users are addicted to downloads and that makes them natural targets for malware predators.

So, it's out there.. Not a lot of people know how to recognize it.. Not a lot of people understand the damage piracy does to everyone - creator, customer and merchant combined.  Not a lot of people realize the personal risk they take when downloading and installing material from an unknown site.  Why not a tutorial on the what's, where's and how's of avoiding piracy, malware and its impact on the Poser community?