Might I also recommend siteadvisor.com, free add in to IE (Internet Explorer) and FF (Firefox) tells you about dangerous downloads, scams, etc. Maybe I'll get some webspace and start a real p2p downloads website so people dont get conned.

(double post)

O.K. I've been scammed too, and am currently seeking a refund through my card company. In my defence I caught at www.All-LimeWire.com. Never having been to LW before I did not realise this was not the genuine site. Their home page headlines with "Limewire". Surely the real LW can do something about this one?

There seems to be some trouble happening at a few of these rip of sits , A lot have very good defence but i will return

My brother told me about Limewire. I thought I'd try it out. Knowing nothing about it I figure I'll go to Google and do a search for "Limewire". I didn't know I could have simply gone to "limewire.com" to download it. Some sites have multiple software products so you have to go to the company website (like if you want to download Adobe Acrobat Reader you have to go to adobe.com, not "AcrobatReader.com").

At Google I see at the top of the screen in the blue shaded (the "sponsored links") area a link called "Download Limewire (tm) 2007". So I click on it and follow the prompts to download Limewire. I actually paid the darned subscription! I didn't know Limewire is shareware at the time. Once all was said and done I found I can't download a Mac version.

I finally looked-into-it and found I was scammed by downloading from "Limewire.Free-MP3-Share.com". I was then sent an e-mail from "themusicsmembersarea.com" with my password to log-in. If I go to themusicsmembersarea.com and login then choose Support the website tells you that you only have the option of e-mail support and asks for your e-mail address. When you input that it says "no access". So there's no way to contact these scammers.

There's supposedly a free 7-day trial period and I'm still in that 7 day window, but I called the phone number I found in a forum on the web (their website leads you nowhere) and a message says that due to heavy holiday volume they're closed today and to get any support info you need from a website (mydownloading.com) which of course leads you NOWHERE. So, now when I call again on Monday assuming I get hold of a human I'm sure they're going to claim I'm past my 7 day trial period. BUT THEY ARE CLOSED DURING THEIR POSTED HOURS!

Do any of these scam operators ever get arrested?

Contact your Credit card company and tell them that you paid a scam site..See if you can get your money back that way...

__________________


If you dont live for something...
You die for nothing...

I'd like to try that, but I paid with my ATM/Check/Credit card. I don't know if this'll work, but I'll try.

Who are the scumbags who do this sort of thing? Didn't their parents teach them any ethics? Are they driving around in Porsches knowing they're misleading people into paying them money for no services in return?

can someone please advise me?? my sister in law has logged onto limewire.com paid about £30.00 has no download and then got an emal saying that she registered to a hoax site... i have www.limewire.com/english/content/download.shtml as a proper site, am i also correct in thinking limewire is completelt free and the only payment is if u want to update to a bigger package?? help

Well, I just have to post something here to help relieve my frustrations. I am hardly a noob, I've been on the net since '93 or '94, had my own .com website for a while, etc. I fell for the scam less than two weeks ago because I was googling for public domain music and found allcoolmusic.com. (Appears at the top, one of Google’s paid advertisers) By this time I had been searching for PD music for an hour or so and wasn’t finding anything worthwhile, so I decided to take a chance on this site. I thought that what I was paying for would access to a web site that would have a huge collection of music that is considered in the public domain and thus that I could use in my video projects without worry of copyright infringement. So I give my CC# and get a link to download the software (at this point I'm thinking, why am I downloading software when I thought I was getting access to a site) and after installing it I find I have just paid for Limewire, only it's called mp3rocket. Besides looking EXACTLY like Limewire beyond the name mp3rocket on the top, it used the same preferences I already have set for Limewire and it resumed downloads I had started with Limewire. Well, in the allcoolmusic.com FAQ page (http://www.musicinc.cc/eng/help_faqs.php) membership/account question number 4 of 5 states “QUESTION: How do I cancel my membership? EXPLANATION: If for some reason you are not satisfied with your membership, you can cancel at any time with no further obligation. Send a note to customer service and your account will be cancelled within 2-3 business days.” To send a note to their customer service you do it from within your browser through their website, a fact that I did not realize until I started trying to find copies of the emails I sent them few days later and realized that I didn’t send them from Thunderbird on my computer. This mattered when I contacted my credit card company and they wanted copies of the emails I sent. When you go to the page to sent the email you are now on the www.musicinc.cc web site, where it states “SUPPORT RESPONSE : Please keep in mind that although we will try our best to respond to your inquiry as soon as possible, with thousands of members, at times it could take 12-24 hours before we are able to respond. We DO appreciate your patience and understanding!” So I waited 48 hours for my first response. Nothing. So I fire off another email explaining that this is the second one I am sending please respond etc. Again, after 48 hours, nothing. This brings me up to last night. I am really starting to get ticked off so I check my CC online site and see that the charges are still there, and that I had been charged DOUBLE what they said a lifetime membership cost, and to make it even worse, I had been charged TWICE! Now I am really getting angry. So I sent my third email to them, which I had the presence of mind copy and paste into word as well:
Please cancel my account. From your FAQ page:
"I thought the software was free. Why am I being asked to pay? The software is free. You are paying for unlimited technical support and so we can run the website. If unsatisfied, for any reason, you can cancel your membership within 30 days for a full refund. "
Again, please cancel my account. My card was billed on 12/30/06, and today is 1/10/07. It is well before 30 days you specify for a full refund. This is the third email I have sent you. There are several reasons why I want to cancel my account:
5) You charged me $49.34 on my credit card when a lifetime membership was listed on your website as “Lifetime Membership $39.95 - Reduced Now Only $24.44 - Best Value!”
6) You charged my card $49.34 twice, back to back on the same day.
7) This is the third email I have sent you without hearing a reply to the first two, requesting a refund or to cancel my account.
8) When I downloaded and installed mp3rocket, I discovered that I had identical software already on my computer; the only difference being it’s called “Limewire”. Mp3rocket even uses the same preferences I already have saved for Limewire, and it resumes downloads that I originally started with Limewire when I start mp3rocket.
I expect a full refund of $98.68 to be credited back to my card. ($49.34 x 2)
My name is XXXXXXX and that is the name on the credit card that I used to pay for your services. Thank you.

After sending that email I decided to see if I could find any more information about this company and type allcoolmusic.com into google and TADA! There are tons of people who have been scammed by this company. That is how I ended up here. After reading a variety of complaints I decided not to fool around any longer and contacted my CC company to stop payment on these charges. This was not as easy as it may sound, and I spent a good fifteen minutes explaining to the rep why I felt like I had been ripped off and what actions I had taken so far. (This was Capital One BTW). The rep had no problem removing the double charged but asked me to explain several times why I felt that I had been ripped off. I’m not even sure if she had a clue as to the nature of my complain. In the end she relented and now I’m just waiting to see if allcoolmusic.com will still come after me and attempt to collect their money. There should be no way in hell that they have a case, but with a business like this who knows?

are u there?? can i rely on this site as sister in law with no computer knowledge has managed to sign up to a fake site, isnt limewire supposed to be free anyway?? i thought u nly pay if u want to upgrade

allcoolmusic is a big scam business. Get them off the net, see page 5 of this thread. And also get your $$$ BACK!!! (music members)

emmasdilema the only place to get LW is at this link http://www.limewire.com/english/content/download.shtml
Check your browser's history or that of your sister to find exactly what site she went to. LW Pro does NOT cost £30.00
BTW there is only minimal difference between LW Pro & LW Basic so go with Basic & you'll be fine.

I thought of something else that I wanted to mention here as well. Just for fun, some of you may want to try this as well. Go to the allcoolmusic.com welcome page. Where it has the link to the "members" area, click on that. (No worries if you aren't a member) Now think of the most revolting, disgusting user name you can think of and enter that. Below that enter your email address as (revolting, disgusting user name)@hotmail.com, yahoo.com, or whatever, and click enter. Well, suprise, suprise, you are a member! Wow! Now go to their support page and let them know of their site. Of course don't expect a reply but it can be theraputic for some. Obviously they are full of s**t regarding their members area as anyone can get access to this area with a fake username and email address. Pathetic. I have looked over this site and they really do skate on the edge of legality, but I could not find any claims that they make that could not easily be explained away in court. They obviously prey on people who don't know any better, and even catch a few who should know better (like me). Good luck everyone, and if you are reading this before your monthly credit card statement has gone out, I would suggest calling them today and disputing the charges. I don't expect to hear back from the scammers myself.

I'm a long-time cyberspace guy, going back to the old BBS days. And it hurts to admit that I got scammed. But then they added insult to injury.

I'd used Google to lookup Limewire and one of the top hits was something called Limewire 2007. I took a look at it and it offered unlimited downloads for $39.00 for three years. That was much better, I thought, than the .99 cents for every tune on iTunes, so I started signing up, entering my credit card and etc. But when I got to the checkout page a bunch of other programs had been added, including something called Defensza, and I got suspicous. I backed out of the page without authorizing the purchase. No matter, it got put through anyway.

But because I was suspicious I'd checked my bank account online and found the request sitting there but not yet approved. I called US Bank's incorrectly named "fraud" department and told them of the scam. They told me they couldn't do anything about it until they actually authorized it because it was on my debit card and not my Visa. (They can't STOP a fraud, just investigate it later) Go figure? The charge got approved the next day.

Curious now, and more than a little P.O.ed, I did a bunch of research and eventually found a tech support number for one of the scam programs that worked. (Most of the scammer numbers don't, on the rare occasion when there is a number listed). The voice on the other end was a woman with an Indian accent. I complained, using a phony name linked to a real email account, that I'd paid and didn't get my software. She checked her database, several times, once using the phony name and once using a credit card number which I made up on the spot (which means all of my information is kept and stored in a database). When she couldn't find it, with me playing dumber than I really am on the other end of the line, she offered me a special, good only for three days. All the software, including music, movies etc, that I could use for only $19.95. She gave me the URL of this miraculous program download site and when I surfed there, with her still on the phone, it took me to a special site, full of fake testimonials and lots of buttons to download all kinds of free software. The software that I would have paid $19 for was Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0. Every one of the "free" software programs were shareware and freeware programs.

I went immediately to my bank and got a new ATM/Credit card with a new number and destroyed the old one (what a hassle).

By the way, a lot of these phony sites are located, I found when I pursued the URLs, in Malta and in St Kitts, locations where the arm of the law is very short and lots of money laundering and stuff like that apparently goes on.

What these SOBs are doing is not technically illegal, however. If you read the fine print on the license agreements - and who does, really - you'll notice that they're offering techical support etc, not programs. Nothing illegal about offering dolts like me a free program for $20. I really feel like an idiot, or as Bugs Bunny would say, "What a maroon".

__________________
The Coyote

____________

"Those who do not hear the music, think the dancers mad"

I went to Winmix.com and was told that a lifetime membership was only 25 dollars or something like that and it was a one time fee. also there would be no other charges. well i have been getting charged ten dollars a month and because of it my bank is threatening to close my account because that is causing me to go into the negative. i do not know how to get a hold of them to get a refund. so what can i do?

Can you give the exact url address of the site?