Out to Lunch

The depths Thoma$ will sink to… Buggybooz @ MTS2, who PS is one of my fave CC artists, recently had her stuff ripped off by Shakeshaft, one of T$R’s Featured Artists. Obviously, Buggy was rightly well peed off and threw up a fuss.

Then Buggy’s MTS2 account got hacked, and her stuff all pulled. Her policy was changed to ‘do whatever you like with my content’. Coincidence? I think not. An IP check reveals a match with Thoma$$…

From MTS2’s Delphy:

I think it’s clear here one of the following things happened:

- Either Thomas himself removed Buggy’s stuff, or
- Thomas gave the password to his account to somebody else at TSR and they removed it

In addition to the above, they must have gotten buggy’s password from somewhere, which indicates one of two things:

- Either the TSR admins have a way of unencrypting passwords of members, or
- The passwords are not stored encrypted.

Either way, the blatant violation of buggy’s personal details is clear – and either a TSR admin used them (a clear violation of privacy) or gave them to somebody else (which is an even bigger issue).

“But wait!” I hear TSR say. “We didn’t do this, you can’t prove it.” Sorry, but the account clearly belongs to a TSR representative, and clearly has not been used until such time as buggy reported the bad TSR content. The timing and the individuals involved, combined with the proof of IPs and browser info, are too blatant to ignore. I expect the “We didn’t do it, please remove the false accusation” PMs and mails to arrive any day now.

I really don’t know what TSR expected to achieve here. Nothing was lost, everything is back the way it was, and really the only things that got hurt is their own reputation becuase even if they gave the password to somebody else, did they expect nobody to find out? Did they expect buggy – or the community – to take this at face value?

It’s clear to me that TSR either sanctions underhanded tactics, or uses such tactics internally. The best thing to do when getting reports of stolen items is to actually investigate such reports and deal with them, not to go to another site, use blatently private information such as passwords to login, and then delete stuff – which as you can see, didn’t work anyway.

The lesson to be learned here is:
1. Don’t use the same password on TSR as you use ANYWHERE else.
2. TSR can and will share any of your personal details, INCLUDING password, and use it however they want.
3. If you ever report anything to them about one of their FAs, they will take “action” against you.

All this just goes to show how EAs new best friend really treats the community and what it thinks of private user details.

Regards,
Delphy

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