Have you been swindled online recently?

So it has been the popular post that Darin CC has been cheating a lot of people with his blog contest. Picking popular blogs to win so as to gain the additional baklink that these blogs afford. John Cow has come out lashing Darin for his failure to deliver on his promise of the prize that Mr John Cow has won. The likes of Contest Beat and Ms Danielle are also swimming in the swindled pool.

The funny thing about Darin CC is that he is willing to pay the $75 bucks for John Cows button ads and the same ads on John Chow’s for $500 bucks (and some other blogs if I remember correctly) but yet he wants to skim on fulfilling his promise of the prizes that he so boldly advertised as top prizes which cost less than the ads? What gives? Is his reputation worth so little? Or is he trying to warn his potential customers that that is the level of work that they should expect from him when they engage his service?

On the other hand, I had been on the other side of the coin. I ran a contest when I first started this blog and gave away $30 USD to the eventual winner on the understanding that the winner would fulfill his part of the bargain on announcing his winnings on his blog so that I can proof to my readers that I did indeed give away the prize money but the winner collected the money and refused to fulfill his end of the bargain.

Well, it goes to show that even on the online world, we have to be careful about who we deal with, especially when it comes to deals that involved money. Many a times, we bloggers are trusting people and expect others to be like us as well. This is not really true as we can see the likes of Darin CC and http://j-ne.ws/ who are not trustworthy enough to fulfill their end of the bargain. So the lesson learn is, whatever we do, better go in with our eyes open.