Or how a simple design project turned into an International incident. A while back we told you about the shop getting stung in an episode of credit card fraud. To recap – a new ‘client’ submitted a client brief for a couple of logo design projects – one for some outfit called Ministering Angel Casino, another for the Ace King Poker Room – and paid for them using a credit card and information that been pinched from someone else.
Alas, as there was nothing obviously suspicious about the orders, we didn’t pick up the fraudulent payments at first blush, and dutifully designed the logos as per typical projects at the shop. We’ve tackled many a casino logo over the years, and the design process for these two proceeded like any other. After the projects wrapped, we had shipped final source files for the poker room project and getting ready to ship finals for the angel artwork when our credit card provider gave us the heads up. The actual owner of the credit card used had discovered bogus items on his bill – two of them being the Ministering Angel Casino and the Ace King logo projects – and had contacted his credit card company to reverse the charges.
Once we were notified of the bogus orders, we canceled any remaining payments, nuked the client pages and removed all the preview images from our site. We also halted shipment of final source files for the Ministering Angel project, as well as the copyright transfer documents for the artwork itself.
Looking back at the designer-’client’ communications, other than the original brief, the ‘client’ never ‘signed’ their e-mails with anything but the salutation ‘regards’. In hind-sight, that should have aroused some suspicion, but being a trusting lot, we never paid it much notice. Other than knowing the domain from which the generically named e-mails originated – www.gamblinginfo.com, tracing the IP numbers to an internet provider in Belgrade, Serbia (wish we’d done that earlier – the ‘client’ was supposed to be USA-based) and having the name of the real credit card holder (now revealed as an unwilling participant), we didn’t really have a clue who we were talking to. And not surprisingly, once we had informed the ‘client’ that we were hip to the ruse, all e-mails ceased.
We had been had.
Figured that we’d been duped as part of a credit card ‘probe’ (often, fraudsters with hot credit cards will use random online merchants to ‘test’ the name, number and expiry dates before going on to seriously hammer the cards elsewhere, purchasing the merch they actually want). A cursory investigation wasn’t much help. The gamblinginfo.com domain was registered to some cat in Serbia who, for the moment, we’ll refer to as A. M. A quick Google search of his name turned up a few matches, but nothing terribly dramatic. As a matter of fact, other than a few gambling forum posts, any mentions that we did find gave the appearance of an upstanding citizen, and Google hits led us to the deputy director of a Serbian ammunition manufacturer, and to someone who was part of a web security company (in retrospect, pretty ironic). All-in-all, nothing really to chase down. We figured that none of the domain info was legit, and that e-mails had been sent through proxies and various intertubes trickery. After all, no-one would use a real domain to commit several instances of credit card fraud, would they?
At the end of the day, we chalked up the experience as an inherent drawback of dealing internationally and online. We even managed to find a bright side. While we had sent the source files for one of the projects, we had managed to retain physical ownership of the angel logo digital files and copyright. Accordingly, while we were out the considerable amount of time devoted to the project, as well as the dough, at least we weren’t out the artwork, a pretty decent logo design if I do say so myself. Once the dust had settled, we had a cool little angel logo that we could use for some internal project or a public service giveaway (an anti-fraud logo seemed fitting – prelims above). With the natural assumption that this Ministering Angel Casino was a fake company, we didn’t give using our angel artwork a second thought. After all, nobody in their right mind would use stolen credit cards to pay for a logo, and then turn around and use it to publicly market an actual new company, right? Especially for a supposedly legitimate online ‘casino’ that would rely on credit card payments, and the necessary customer ‘trust’, to operate?
Well, as it turns out, they just might.
A few weeks later, we received another e-mail, from another gambling domain, www.bellerockgaming.ws, registered to (strangely enough) the same dude as the gamblinginfo.com website. The e-mail also originated from the exact same IP# as the designer-’client’ communications from the original logo projects. The unsigned request (with the usual ‘regards’ salutation) asked for a quote for adding our angel logo (supplied as an attachment) to some fairly creepy artwork that they were supposedly using as the background for the Ministering Angel Casino software (above).
Apparently preview .jpg files had been pinched off our client pages before we had pulled them down (guess it’s a tad optimistic to expect credit card crooks to abide by a service agreement) and they had sent our logo artwork back to us for a quote. They were searching for yet another dupe to finish the project (we had to decline) and had forgotten who they had pinched the logo from. Once again, when we responded to the RFQ, detailing the back-story of the logo, communication ceased. It retrospect, it looks like we were subjected to a fraudulent credit card ‘probe’ – the culprit had used the poker room project to ‘test’ the stolen vitals, and then submitted the ‘real’ project – the Ministering Angel Casino logo – once the credit card was confirmed as being ‘live’. And in a case of breathtaking audacity, it seemed like these folks were going to use that stolen logo to brand their casino.
If that was the case, and since we knew the name of the outfit (we had added it to the Ministering Angel logo after all) it was only a matter of time before this stuff started showing up in Google. Which, it did. First, the logo appeared on www.virtualaffiliateconvention.com, a casino affiliate website, in an account attributed to A. M. (yep, our Serbian bloke again), on a page that proudly announces his new casino software to the world and asking for investors and affiliates (above).
Next, we found our logo in the portfolio section of a Serbian freelance designer called Ivan Krstić, a seemingly talented bloke who announced that he was working on a website for the Ministering Angel Casino, complete with a thumbnail of our angel design and a promise that the ‘under construction’ site would be ‘online very soon’ (above). And then, at long last, the logo showed up on the actual Ministering Angel Casino website – www.ministeringangel.com (below). Yowzah. Turns out these clowns were actually going to use our logo to market their casino website after all.
The site, while registered to some Panamanian outfit called Royal Flamingo Corp., and hosted on Panama-based servers, listed our A. M. friend as both administrative and technical contacts. Apparently Eastern Europe has a bad rap when it comes to internet ‘trust’ and Panama offers ‘shell corporations’ as way to hide one’s real locale (with the added bonuses of Panama’s lax taxation and corporate responsibility laws). And a Royal Flamingo Corp. domain? Yep, despite the corporation supposedly hailing from Panama, Serbia based A. M. is listed and admin and tech contacts for www.royalflamingocorp.com too. This character certainly seems to be ground-zero for who had pinched us. We’re not exactly, as our lawyers would like us to say, accusing the owner of all these websites of being the actual culprit. But it does seems odd that his is the only name that shows up when it comes to all the domains, companies and casino websites that are connected to our credit fraud ‘problem’. And maybe, just maybe, he might know just what the hell was going on? So I decided to ask.
To be continued…
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Mind if I steal the AceKing logo? =P