Hari's Corner

Apart from the old, infamous Nigerian e-mail scam, there are plenty of sophisticated online scams which really seem genuine and fairly respectable companies until you take a closer look and the time to investigate.

Recently, I had been interested in the 1960s version of Batman (the Adam West TV series). I got to plenty of sites and found reviews and other information; but from what I could gather it appeared that the series has not yet been officially released on DVD due to legal issues between Time Warner and Fox.

Interested in knowing whether the issue has been resolved recently, I did a google search for "Batman 1960s DVD" and came across a number of similar looking sites selling DVDs of old, but popular TV shows at quite low prices.

The sites (which I won't link here) look reasonably decent, professional and have all the necessary "product information", FAQs and other relevant info to lull suspicion. However, the first thing I noticed was that there was no legitimate business contact address or e-mail (there was a web form, but no address provided).

The second thing was that they claimed to be selling ALL seasons including every single episode of most of theses shows and further, quite a number of these shows have never been legally released on DVD at any time (like the Batman show I mentioned).

On a related note, on some of these sites, the "ORDER" button was dysfunctional and the user was pointed to a Google AdSense link, which immediately triggered my suspicions in the first place.

Then I searched for "xxx website scam" (where xxx is the domain name of these websites) and found a number of complaints about several of these sites, which all seem to originate from one company and found that most people who had got cheated of several hundreds of dollars were looking for their favourite old TV shows (which are not legally available or very rarely available on DVD today). Complaints range from:

• (Most likely outcome) I haven't received the goods / haven't heard from them ever again.
• Extremely poor quality "home-made" DVDs which often fail to work at all and if lucky, contain TV recordings of these shows (mostly only a small part/few episodes).
• The website / company has wound up but re-appeared in a new avatar.

I write this because I am quite shocked that google and yahoo have not de-spammed their search index and allows these scam sites to continue and in some cases, are even listed as "Sponsored links".

I hope people will keep an eye out for these websites and be very careful before doing any business with them. A lot of them look really genuine and professional and only a close check will reveal some suspicious details like I mentioned above.

I know how popular some old TV shows are and I wish that the companies holding legal ownership over them bring out official DVDs instead of driving people into even falling for shady deals from companies of dubious origin.