I’d like to preface this this by saying I’m an active member of the fetish community, and that I decided to write this particular article because I thought it was equal parts frustrating and intriguing how something like this could not only happen, but be tolerated and seemingly unquestioned. With all the talk going around, I figured it made sense to put all of the information together for others to read and become aware of what is undeniably happening right in front of our eyes.
For those of you who don’t know, clips4sale is the oldest clip site in the business, hanging around for over 15 years at this point. And for those of you who haven’t noticed (and for those who have), the #1 highest selling store on clips4sale’s top 50 list for the month of December is a store named Aria Lamar. Never heard of this store? Well neither have I, and we’re not alone! If you ask any other store that is regularly in the top 50, they’ll probably tell you the same thing. So, what does it mean when a store that most of the industry has never seen beats out every single other store in terms of sales for a month? Quite simply, it means it’s a fake store. If you’re not sure what it means to be a fake store, allow me to explain.
A fake store is something this industry will occasionally see; a store that’s created to appear as though it’s a regular store, but when looking in closer detail at things such as the quality or length of the content vs. it’s pricing, it just doesn’t add up. Looking at Aria Lamar, we have the lowest possible quality of resolution on every video (320×240), the shortest length possible for every video (2 minutes), and all clips are $499.99!! Fake? Every indication says yes. Now that we’ve identified this, we still have the question of how a fake store could get to be the #1 store on c4s? Most of the talk in the community suggests money laundering, as it’s something the industry has seen before.
For those of you who don’t know what money laundering is or how it works, allow me to explain. First, someone will acquire a large sum of money from an illegal activity such as selling drugs, running prostitution, swiping stolen credit cards, etc. Needless to say, the money has no paper trail and isn’t reported on any books. So the person with the money cannot spend the money or make any purchases for two reasons: One, it’s all in cash so most large transactions such as buying a car won’t be possible. And two, spending large amounts of cash without a paper trail will raise red flags. So in order to be able to spend the money, what this person has to do is set up some an intermediary (which is most often a business or shell company) that allows them to conceal the source of the illegal money. Breaking Bad fans will be familiar with a perfect example of this; the car wash Walter White purchases. It allows him to ring up cash transactions all day with his illegal cash. And after the money goes through the business, it appears legitimate and can be reported as earned money to the IRS.
Are you starting to see a connection? A clip store is an IDEAL way to launder money. All someone needs to do is apply for a store and get approved, upload some videos for sale, and go buy prepaid cards with cash at a local store and then use the prepaid card(s) to make purchases from their store. At the end of the month, a payout will be issued and the launderer will be awarded cash.
And what’s an even scarier thought is if this fake store’s transactions are being made with stolen cards! Let me explain what this would look like. Regardless of how long it takes, the cardholders would eventually find these charges on their cards and file chargebacks. When these thousands of dollars get pulled from clips4sale’s account they might have already issued a payout to this store. If the payout has been issued, where do you think the money will come from to cover this? Would they decide to pass chargebacks along to other stores to soften the blow to themselves? I personally don’t think c4s is an unethical company; most likely this isn’t the path they would go. However, the money would certainly have to come from somewhere. Maybe they will have to pull it from their marketing budget? Or even worse for their stores, they might pull it from their development budget? Wherever it comes from it’s a safe bet that it will negatively stagger or hurt the company, and this will cause a ripple effect that will be felt by it’s stores.
Now admittedly, there’s no way to prove with absolute certainty that money laundering is what’s occurring with the Aria Lamar store. So for the sake of argument and to avoid direct accusations, let’s assume there’s at least one other plausible scenario (non-illegal) to account for how this has happened. So lets figure out what it would take to be the #1 store? It’s widely known that the top producing stores on c4s can easily earn more than $25,000 in busy months of the year. December happens to be one of the busier months because consumers of any product consistently spend more during the holidays. Because it’s more than halfway through the month, it would be a fair assumption that any given store would need no less than $12,000-$15,000 in sales to be in this #1 spot.
A few people have said that this could be a strategy of a content producer; spending their own money on sales in their store to get homepage exposure on c4s. But the thing you’d need to consider is the huge 40% loss on your money if you wanted to do this! It would net you a loss of over $5000…almost $200/day for a single advertisement. But lets assume this is actually what’s happening here, there’s yet another problem…the content itself! Every video is bad resolution, has zero production value, and is less than 2 minutes in length. I don’t think this is the recipe for an inbox full of customer emails begging for more!
And lastly, the elephant in the room that everyone is probably asking themselves by now…wouldn’t the only way for this to be possible, is if the clip site were to allow it? I mean, if all the indications for suspicious activity or possible fraud were there, shouldn’t the site take responsibility to protect it’s Even if someone wanted to create a fetish store to launder money, wouldn’t the clip site put a stop to it before it gets out of hand? Every site is different, so it wouldn’t be fair to assume all sites would handle it the same. But what we have is an example of the site who should command the most respect in the business, doing absolutely nothing in response to this. Instead of protecting the integrity of its brand and listening to its long-time store operators, nothing is being done. I personally feel it’s becoming increasingly difficult to justify my loyalty.
From the concerned