Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hello everyone,

Please read all of the following details...

Last night sometime around 2 a.m. someone (obviously a scumbag) clicked many Kingsnake.com Ball Python classifieds ads' "Contact Me" link and entered in our e-mail address "sales@exoticsbynature.com" as well as very rude and aggressive comments to the receipients.

We hold NO ill feelings toward anyone in the reptile community consumer or competitor! We are unsure exactly how many ads or posts were answered from "sales@exoticsbynature.com" with nasty comments but we are seriously concerned about our reputation with you all. We have never had a dissatisfied customer in all of our years doing business so the culprit is obiviously one of our competitors!

Some of the people that were e-mailed from this incident were Ben Siegel, Joe & Wes @ Morph King Reptiles, Neil Gubitz, and Mike Jolliff. Some of these people are friends, some just business aquaintences. Everyone that received an e-mail, you have my apologies and my promise that I will not stop until these people are found out and punished for this type of fraud!!

We're discussing these matters with Kingsnake.com's staff and hope to resolve these issues A.S.A.P.

If you have been e-mailed by us with ANY negative or ill-hearted comments, please contact us. Please forward us these e-mails as it will help us find out who was behind this pitiful, cowardly attack.

We appreciate your support and understanding through this ordeal. We feel that we have always conducted ourselves with the utmost pride and honesty. We intend to be a part of the reptile business for many years to come and e-mailing others nasty comments would be very foolish for us to do.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Please e-mail or call us with any questions you may have!

985.893.0082
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Sean Bradley
Owner : EbN
www.ExoticsByNature.com
www.BallPythonMorphs.com
www.CornSnakeMorphs.com

h
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0.1 "Tremper" looking Albino Leopard gecko (Lex)
0.0.1 tiger crested gecko (peachs)
0.1 Red blood python (hilary)
1.1 Feral cats that we adopted (Fuzzy, and Bear)

My image Gallery

My question to King Snake and Jeff is how hard would it be to set up in the classifieds that a user MUST log in to send an email? That way you can not recieve a "fake" email from another beeder/person. You need to sign in to post in this forum and send an email here should it not be the same in classifieds? A real no brainer!!!!!!
I know I was upset when a JERK sent you Sean an email with my name on it. As long as sick puppies can do it they will.
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RicK @ BbI

Ball Boutique,Inc.
The home of the singing snakes!

Interesting dilemma.

On the one hand, if I paid for a KS ad I'd want to make it as easy as possible for any potential customer to get to me. If you where required to log in with your account for posting on the forums you would screen out everyone who is banned and anyone who is too lazy or doesn’t want to sign up for an account.

However, with a completely open system you get problems like these. I assume though that the IP's are at least logged so it probably isn't completely anonymous now.

Are you allowed to put your e-mail address and phone number in ads? I guess those who really want to make it easy could put those in and those who are more concerned about not getting fake e-mails could rely on whatever security KS decides to put into their "web-mail" interface. A down side of putting direct e-mail addresses out is that they can get scanned and pulled into spam engines. I finally started getting spam at my "snake" address and it sucks.

If you post in here you had to log on. If you sent an email from this post to me you have to log on. Why not the same for classifieds? If a person is banned they can go to my site and email me. Yes I get some pranks. Guess we just have to expect that there are a$$es out there.
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RicK @ BbI

Ball Boutique,Inc.
The home of the singing snakes!

If the classifieds had the same rules (login needed to send a web-mail) it would still have a huge field of potential buyers (the same field as potential posters and web-mailers for this forum). However, there are probably a few people who are banned or don't want to sign up for a login or have technical problems logging in. I guess you have to ask if excluding these people and making it a little harder for potential buyers to contact those placing ads is worth the added security. I know I have to allow cookies for kingsnake.com in order to post to this site. There was a time (I think the cookie site has changed but so has my browser version) when I had to ask what site needed cookies allowed because my browser wasn't prompting me as to why I couldn't post. Basically any added security will probably weed out or at least slow down (required time to login) some small percentage of potential buyers. Something that may have already been considered before the current classified web-mail system was designed as it is today.

n/p