Paige K.

I made an account to purchase a gift card. Only after I paid was I notified that I would not be able to get the redemption code for the gift card I paid for until I verified my identity, No biggie, I just need to verify my email address and phone number, right? WRONG! In order to get what I paid for, I have to send them a photo of my ID, a photo of me holding my photo ID, and a copy of my phone bill. They're asking for more than adult content sites require from creators, which is unreasonable enough on it's own, but the fact that these requirements aren't communicated until after you've paid for a product is unacceptable.

I'm going to start with my most recent experience and work backwards; months after reaching out via email and having my account permanently deleted, they are now sending me emails about my (non-existent) account being over the storage limit and how I need to pay them to access my own photos. After having been a legitimate free service for many years, functionality began steadily declining at some point in the mid-late 2010's. Ads made it virtually unusable, and they got rid of a feature that allowed you to download multiple photos from your account to your device. A year or two ago, they notified long-time users who joined at a time where the storage limit for accounts was quite high that they were reducing the storage limit to 250 photos and users would have to download their photos before a certain date before they would delete photos that exceeded the storage limit. These crooks conveniently waited until after removing user's access to their own photos to reintroduce the multi-download feature. Many users complained in comments on ther Facebook ads that they had paid the ransom but still hadn't gotten all of their photos back, at least one of which their team responded to with a snide remark. They have also been hiding hundreds of comments speaking out against them on their posts. Fortunately for me, I took the time to go through my thousands of photos one by one and save them all individually, so I had no problem telling them to delete my account (they make that difficult too - there's no link to delete your account, you have to reach out via email and it took them nearly a month to confirm that my account was permanently removed). However, now they're back in my inbox still trying to extort me for money.