Big Al's Spot (& Annie too)

I'm not a great batman fan as these things go, I've liked some of the films that have gone before, but I am very far from a batman obsessed nut.

I wasn't expecting much of Batman Begins I certainly never experienced any of the normal hype that one associates with Hollywood Blockbusters, but if Christopher Nolan does another Batman film, I'll be the first in the queue to go to watch it.

I think the fact that the film was not as dark as previous films was a real bonus, I actually got to see what was happening. I don't know were all the budget was spent, but it was worth it to my mind.

Anyway I'm now a Batman fan again.

As you may or may not know we run a little plus size dress business called www.berkswelldirect.com and we are an authorizedUK retailer for Calito .

Well things have been a little slow on the business front and before blaming the weather I took a look through my website activity logs and low and behold some ebayer has been linking to my L'Amour Satin fabric pictures. I'm really quite proud of just how good they originally came out. However using my pictures is bad enough, but stealing my bandwidth too is a kick in teeth.

So I've had to modify the pictures to include a Copyright image, which sort of ruins the look, but other than disabling linking entirely there is not a lot I can do really.

If I disabled linking I wouldn't be able to put the picture up here for a start and to be honest its quite nice when someone uses a picture to illustrate our wares on a blog or forum. I'm sure it makes some difference to peoples awareness if not exactly to our sales.

I had thought of going for a real sabotage job with a few choice pictures of porn or a monkeys backside, but maybe a more subtle way might be the way to go.

When I research further I found that the person stealing my bandwidth is also stealing bandwidth from at least 35 other websites as well as their designs and pictures. Tends to be the case with what I can only assume are Chinese manufacturers. I'm not a great advocate of copyright, but when people blatantly try to make money on your hard work and pass if off as their own without any sort of acknowledgement then I think it goes beyond any light hearted personal use it is just stealing plain and simple and the police should take it as seriously as other crime.

Well it had to happen, I've been scammed on the internet. Anyone who knows me knows that I never sign-up of anything that could be remotely to do with reward schemes or discount schemes as I don't like getting tracked and sent loads of marketing junk mail.

Having used Vistaprint.co.uk previously without any hassle I was surprised to see a £9.95 charge on reviewing my credit card statement for this month.

I remembered a recent complaint about Vistaprint on a forum I read and started to do a bit of searching to see if there was any similar problems to mine. Sure enough when searching google there were plenty of similar souls scammed by vistaprint, MSN had knowledge of vistaprint scams and even yahoo had hundreds of fraudulent transactions .

Why would any company with such a winning concept as theirs be so stupid or naive as to try and make a quick buck. Are they really that stupid? Have they no concept of customer loyalty and how to keep it? Have they never read anything on customer service?

This is a company worth an apparent $1.262 billion with 7 million odd customers at the time of writing. Okay they weren't making a whole lot of money out of me, but they were my first call for printing, BUT NOT ANYMORE, if my experience is anything to go by I'd say it is a definite stock to sell.

Hell have no fury like a customer scorned.