Last week, I blogged about WaWa Digital, a fraud-house that calls up people who order its digital cameras and pressures them to buy overpriced accessories. If they decline, the store cancels the order.

A WaWaDigital representative left a disgruntled customer a voicemail threatening to "break his neck" if he tried to come to the store and collect his order.

Don Wiss (a photographer in Brooklyn who has posted galleries of the mailing addresses that are listed as the store locations of Brooklyn's fraud-stores) went and took some pictures of the storefront for PriceRitePhoto (another company that previously threatened to have a blogger who posted about his negative experiences with the company arrested), a graffiti-scrawled, semi-derilict building in Brooklyn with no evidence of any kind of legitimate retail operation.

Now Wiss's website has been knocked off the Internet, and anonymous callers have accused him of "running them out of business" and told him that he'd be dead if he didn't leave the country.

Brooklyn's DA is Charles Hyne -- I hope that he can be persuaded to take an interest in these crooked, violent dirtbags.

As you no doubt know, someone posted a link to your Brooklyn camera story on Slashdot on 12/1. One of the comments mentioned my donwiss.com/ pictures/ BrooklynStores web site. I had the most hits ever.

Yesterday donwiss.com had a DOS attack. 497 simultaneous connections. My host cut me off so not to bring down the other clients on that server. I then switched my dns to a backup host.

Today I received two phone calls at work. First one like blaming me for driving them out of business. Says they have already shut it down. But, of course, he didn't disclose what business, and they had caller id turned off.

I then got a second phone call. He told me to watch my back. He said if I don't leave the country I will be killed. Now nowhere at my site do I pass any judgment on the dealers here. So why blame me? My question is have you been threatened? Of course, living here in Brooklyn makes me a convenient target.

Update: Thomas sez,:

The outfit that threatened to break a customer's neck (that you blogged) was actually WaWa Digital. A different photographer named Daniel took photos of WaWa Digital's store after reading of this death threat.

Don Wiss (the guy now being given death threats) has had his photo series of Brooklyn storefronts up for a while now. It was through his photo series that I recently was able to link up the individual that may be the true owner or PriceRitePhoto, Chaim Pikarski.

By the way, PriceRitePhoto on Monday changed their identity on eBay from priceritephoto to barclaysphoto. They have also now registered the domain name barclaysphoto.com and I suspect plan to do business there now that there PriceRitePhoto name has been trashed all over the internet due to their bad behavior.

It's a tangled web they weave and it doesn't help that these Brooklyn photo shops keep changing their names and that there may be more than a few sleazy operators.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:11:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments