The Implosion of a Groupon Digital Rip-Off Artist
There's been a lot of article about Groupon lately, but I find yesterday's events to be among the most fascinating. The short version is that Groupon offered a coupon for a one-hour photo-shoot with a photographer named Dana Dawes. Based on the sales volume, the participating photograher committed herself to an unrealistic number of hours of work at an unsustainable rate. While this is a problem in itself, the bigger story only unfolded when Groupon customers started noticing that the quality of some of the photographer's photographs seemed to deviate wildly from others. It was determined that she had stolen photographs from other photographers on the web, watermarked them with her own business name, and posted them to her portfolio.

TechCrunch covered the problematic promotion here:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/16/groupon-photography/

There's an archive of the original Groupon discussion thread here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2138676/discussion.html

The photographer came up with a variety of excuses which she posted to the Groupon discussion forum. First she claimed her site was hacked. This excuse is problematic because if true, the same hacker would have had to hack into her Facebook profile and post the same photos there as well. It's also confusing what incentive a "hacker" would have to conduct such an act. The photos called into question began to disappear from her site. On the Groupon thread, the photographer claimed that she was not the one removing the photographs because somebody had reset her password and she was unable to access her site. It's unclear why somebody that went to the trouble of watermarking stolen photographs to add to her portfolio would then go to the trouble of removing those same photographs. They were also removed from her Facebook page.

A flurry of users popped up in the Groupon discussion thread to defend Dana's name. Unfortunately, some of these posters seemed to mixup who they were and responded to questions posted to other users. This lead many to believe that Dana may have posted using multiple usernames. In fact, if you search on the web you can find that a Fivver.com user with a similar name has offered this service for sale in the past. Google Cache holds a copy of a previous Fivver.com listing offering seven Yelp.com reviews of your business using multiple usernames:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:EVQcMOfXg4QJ:www.fiverr.com/users/dkdawes/gigs/write-7-reviews-for-your-business-service-or-prdoduct-on-yelpcom+dkdawes&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

If you don't own a business, or have a need for her photography, but instead have homework you'd like answered then somebody with an identical name as Dana is offering test answers and homework solutions for $5 each:

http://studentoffortune.com/user/dkdawes79/questions_answered

While the "hacker" may have been nice enough to remove these photos from her business website and Facebook page, apparently they forgot to remove these same photos from her Me.com portfolio. Those are still available online here:

http://gallery.me.com/dkdawes#100015

To me, this case perfectly highlights both the beautiful-side and the ugly-side of the internet, and the business it has spawned. It's become easier than ever to get your products in front of potential customers, while at the same time ... this same access has made it just as easy for those with malicious intent to exploit this type of situation for personal gain.