Can anyone confirm that Illusion Mage is a scam/fraud and is actually just a slightly altered version of Blender?  I saw their ad on Facebook, they even have their own FB page.  If you take a look at the screenshots it looks just like Blender, and I've even read some reviews that make that claim as well.

The other part of this scam is they trick people into setting up their own websites which advertise and link back to the IllusionMage.com main site.

Well I found this on the Blender Website:

The companies IllusionMage and 3Dmagix resell via their websites Blender under their own name. Both websites are probably managed by the same person or company.

On their web pages they intentionally hide that the products are distributions of GNU GPL licensed software, and that the software is freely downloadable as well. More-over, even after contacting them several times, they don't remove copyrighted content from their websites. A lot of text and images have been copied from blender.org and random images - not even from blender - were copied from various CG websites.

Rebranding and re-distributing GNU GPL software is a key right. This doesn't give the right to then also rebrand the credits, claims and artwork as created with Blender.

The sad thing is especially that people are being lured in with the suggestion that this is a cracked version Autodesk 3D Max. Their customers probably feel too ashamed after purchasing this product to complain really...

But what can we do? Not much really... lawyers will be a waste of money on this. Best is as usual to just publicize this well. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" as a U.S. Supreme Court judge once said.

Ton Roosendaal
Chairman Blender Foundation

Yep, you've got it. The people at Blender have asked Blender users to spread the word, put it on their websites so that when wannabe users do a google search, those company names are associated with fraud and scam and hopefully people will be warned away.

Re-branding Blender is not a scam: claiming it is your creation is.