I spent a few hours reading thru this entire thread. (Actually I started out researching an entirely different matter.)
-Incidently, the first post I came accross was a year and a half old! This problem has been goin' on for awhile now it seems!-
My girfriend signed up thru imusicsearch last Aug and I remember that the first thing that confused me was getting the LimeWire nag-screen to buy the PRO version. (Its not much of a nag-screen I admit, probably the least intrusive I've come across.)

Anyway, I looked at a few of the websites mentioned here and noticed that many of them have the exact same layout just different graphics. Typing in my email address into the "members area" in a few took me to the exact same page (musicinc.cc). Interesting!

What I really wanted to mention (and ask about) was that my girlfriend first found "imusicsearch.com" via
webreviews.org which (I just discovered) also goes by http://www.my-free-music.com/ Is this legal? I always thought ".org" was non-profit. (The first two links on that page lead to similar pages, "my music inc" and "imusicsearch")

I did a google and yahoo search on music downloads and didn't come up with webreviews.org as my gf did in Aug. I really didn't see too many of the sites mentioned here, except in the sponsered links on the side...that's the good news.

Now for the irony; I noticed when I registered for this forum just now that some of the sponser links (ads by Google) at the top of the pages of this thread are to the very type of sites that are being complained about! One is:

Download It Now ---which apparently leads to a bunch of those sites.

I'll leave it at that. I guess I shouldn't mention the other irony, (all of us who got scammed are -in a way- helping to pay for this forum, where we complain about getting scammed.)

One more thing. I need to reiterate something that was mentioned before in the thread. (This is for ukbobboy01). Please remember that alot of us came across these sites in the wake of the trouble with Napster and the RIAA. I knew what file sharing was but didn't think that was what the subscription site was all about. (Actually I had my suspicions, but this was my girlfriends puppy. I can't say much because I once bought a utility program that turned out to be crap!)