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Every electronics/camera store in Brooklyn has been doing this for decades. They are all scammers and conartists.

Shanties and warehouses, or fake addresses, but websites with greymarket and fake products.

Examples of the stores im talking about:
http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/

The FTC has done nothing about it.

People place products thinking they can get it cheaper, and then when they talk to the store the sales people scream and cuss at them if they don't buy addons they "must" buy (like power cords and batteries).

For every 1 reputable company based in NYC and NJ there are hundreds which are ran y petty criminals.

Re SiteTruth complaints: (We have a blog for that.)

Non-commercial web sites aren't rated at all. However, the presence of an ad link marks a site as "commercial", as does being in ".com". Our "commercial intent" detection is rather simplistic. We really should have a classifier system doing that. Yahoo search R&D, back when they had search R&D, built one of those, but never did much with it. We've been reluctant to use machine learning techniques, though, because they reduce the transparency of the system. At present, SiteTruth doesn't rely on "security by obscurity". Adding a classifier system would change that.

Credit rating information is useful because, for businesses, you can get business size information. Annual sales and number of employees are worth knowing, and displaying to the user in search results. (We'll be doing something in that area soon.) There's a guy in Brooklyn, NY, who took pictures of camera stores that advertise on line or for mail order. There are companies with giant warehouses and loading docks, and there are, well, "marginal locations". It's very funny. Search engines need info like that.

As for specific sites:

• Glaxosmithkline: We give them a yellow "?", which means we think they're legit, but don't have third-party verification that the domain is tied to the company. In our hard-ass view, that's an OK rating. SSL certs and BBBonline links provide such third-party verification. They did match our database. We weren't able to parse "Registered office: 980 Great West Road, Brentford, Middlesex, TW8 9GS, United Kingdom.", unfortunately; we only recognize multi-line postal addresses, usable on an envelope, at present.
• Vodaphone All the country sites have SSL certs, but the main ".com" site does not. It does have the address "Vodafone Group Plc / Vodafone House / The Connection / Newbury / Berkshire / RG14 2FN / England" on multiple lines, which we pulled out of the source HTML as a possible address, but did not parse successfully. Still, they got a yellow "?", and were matched to the UK business database.
• Oxfam gets a green checkmark, and the system was able to pull four business addresses from their web site.

If Google uses user comments to affect search, massive attempts would be made by the "search engine optimization" people to game the system. If you thought link farms were bad, phony user farms would be worse. Google won't be able to identify the phonies; they can't even More fundamentally, there's a scaling problem. As I've pointed out before, the number of raters per site has to be large for rating to work. Rating for movies and TV shows works fine. Hotels might get enough ratings to be useful. Joe's Plumbing will be rated only by Joe, Joe's relatives, and Joe's employees.

CustomizeGoogle and GiveMeBackMyGoogle have some good ideas, although GiveMeBackMyGoogle is probably violating Google's terms of service by redistributing Google search results as a web site. Google lets you annotate their search results via their AJAX API, but you're not allowed to add or delete from their results list. If you want to delete items from Google search results, you have to do that via a browser plug-in. (Note, by the way, that Google's Chrome doesn't allow non-Google browser plug-ins. That's a form of DRM, when you think about it.)

With our SiteTruth SiteTruth system, we're addressing the problem by looking at off-web sources of legitimacy. The first question is always "can we find a name and address for the business behind the web site"? We have about four ways to do that. If none of them work, and they're selling something, they get moved down in our search results. If they do have an address, we look them up in various business databases. Considerable data is available about a business, once you can identify it. Ultimately, we want to make the business's credit rating affect their search results. It's necessary to reach out to those hard off-web data sources to separate the real companies from the bottom-feeders. Yes, the "affiliate" crowd will scream. Tough.

As for bottom-feeders, I really like this site, where someone in Brooklyn, NY, took pictures of the storefronts of every Brooklyn photo company he could find that advertised online. It's very funny. Now that's what Google should be doing with StreetView.

Here's our master plan for cleaning up the Web.

Millennium Camera is one of the seemingly endless number of scam-stores based in Brooklyn. They have a lifetime Reseller Rating of (drum roll...) 0.31/10.

The excellent Brooklyn StoreFronts project lists Millennium Camera as being at the same location as several other known scam-shops: A&M Photo World LLC (AMPhotoWorld.com), Preferred Photo (PreferredPhoto.com), Wild Digital (WildDigital.com), Time 2 Envy (stores.ebay.com/Time2Envy)

Needless to say, the $999 price is not real and no one should order from Millennium Camera.

Some fellow slashdotter mentioned this already in another similar story. Anyway, you were looking for this:

http://donwiss.com/pictures/ManhattanStores/

http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/

I suppose you could still add to this since you are so enthusiastic about this.

Some fellow slashdotter mentioned this already in another similar story. Anyway, you were looking for this:

http://donwiss.com/pictures/ManhattanStores/

http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/

I suppose you could still add to this since you are so enthusiastic about this.

Not so funny, I'm sure, if you fall for one of their tricks. Just buy for the good ones, seriously, B&H, Adorama, etc... (although I know tons of people have horror stories about both of those, and any other reputable camera dealer).

You mean something like this?

Here are some interesting pictures of the storefronts

Front doors

Here's the actual place of business for PriceRitePhoto and it's aliases
http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/h0134.h tm

Contacted reseller ratings -they've added the aliases, and they're currently investigating the company.

Time to send an email laughing that they've been slashdotted

You weren't too far off the mark.

http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/h0135.h tm

I bought a DV camera from Butterfly Photo in NYC. I did receive a call back and asked to buy a few accessories but I declined them. I was happy with the purchase but they may have changed sales practices since I ordered from them last year so YMMV.

Check out this site (probably will not survive a slashdot beating long), dude was doing undercover work for rec.photo.digital and tracking these shady places down. Some of these places are nothing but a garage or small office. Butterfly Photo was actually one of them but they let him come inside and take pictures. As odd as that seems, I actually found the linked page while researching BF prior to ordering from them, I considered that gesture a positive thing that maybe they really did not have anything to hide?

A quick google search for 'priceritephoto crook', suprisingly, revealed the following photo of the PriceRitePhoto building.

Looks a bit, uhm, sketchy.

There are hundreds of such businesses in Brooklyn. Most are owned by various 'ethnic' (non-Italian) (I won't say who) mafias and are brutal abusers of their customers.
http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/ has a good summary of the shysters.

Don Wiss has some photos of PriceRitePhoto.com's location (as well as some of related companies).

Are these camera stores in question run by Hasidim?

E.g. I looked at the photos of the camera stores, and saw a lot of Hasidim in the neighborhood:
http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/h0202.h tm
http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/h0147.h tm
http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/h0006.h tm

If that's the case, it kind of explains the rip-off experience. They are infamous for this sort of stuff.

Are these camera stores in question run by Hasidim?

E.g. I looked at the photos of the camera stores, and saw a lot of Hasidim in the neighborhood:
http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/h0202.h tm
http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/h0147.h tm
http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/h0006.h tm

If that's the case, it kind of explains the rip-off experience. They are infamous for this sort of stuff.

Are these camera stores in question run by Hasidim?

E.g. I looked at the photos of the camera stores, and saw a lot of Hasidim in the neighborhood:
http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/h0202.h tm
http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/h0147.h tm
http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/h0006.h tm

If that's the case, it kind of explains the rip-off experience. They are infamous for this sort of stuff.

Dang. I've got "47th Street Photo" on my eBay favourite sellers list (nothing bought yet, just bookmarking them). They don't look so flash anymore. *sigh*

This is apparently very common behavior for camera and electronics shops in Brooklyn. It's so widespread that some guy actually went around and took pictures of the actual physical storefronts for all of these online shops.

Very classy establishments, all.

http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/

Here's what the business actually looks like. This is from the web site of someone who has been photographing the storefronts of mail order photo dealers in Brooklyn. The results are very funny. Some are mail drops. Some are bogus addresses. Some are homes. Some are tiny stores selling something else. Only one is a huge warehouse with loading docks.

It's a bit dated, but Don Wiss has documented the storefronts of most of the Brooklyn and Manhattan photo gear dealers. Some I would obviously never buy from. Others are just fine. A picture is worth a thousand words.

It's a bit dated, but Don Wiss has documented the storefronts of most of the Brooklyn and Manhattan photo gear dealers. Some I would obviously never buy from. Others are just fine. A picture is worth a thousand words.

It's a bit dated, but Don Wiss has documented the storefronts of most of the Brooklyn and Manhattan photo gear dealers. Some I would obviously never buy from. Others are just fine. A picture is worth a thousand words.

It's a bit dated, but Don Wiss has documented the storefronts of most of the Brooklyn and Manhattan photo gear dealers. Some I would obviously never buy from. Others are just fine. A picture is worth a thousand words.

It's a bit dated, but Don Wiss has documented the storefronts of most of the Brooklyn and Manhattan photo gear dealers. Some I would obviously never buy from. Others are just fine. A picture is worth a thousand words.

It's a bit dated, but Don Wiss has documented the storefronts of most of the Brooklyn and Manhattan photo gear dealers. Some I would obviously never buy from. Others are just fine. A picture is worth a thousand words.

It's a bit dated, but Don Wiss has documented the storefronts of most of the Brooklyn and Manhattan photo gear dealers. Some I would obviously never buy from. Others are just fine. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Here's a photo of Wawadigital.net's storefront. Don Wiss has done a great job of documenting all the camera shop storefronts in Brooklyn (where most of the scammers are) and Manhattan (where the few legitimate stores are). Some look somewhat dubious in spite of multi-page slick advertisments in mass-market photo magazines. Would you rather buy from this place or this one?

Here's a photo of Wawadigital.net's storefront. Don Wiss has done a great job of documenting all the camera shop storefronts in Brooklyn (where most of the scammers are) and Manhattan (where the few legitimate stores are). Some look somewhat dubious in spite of multi-page slick advertisments in mass-market photo magazines. Would you rather buy from this place or this one?

Here's a photo of Wawadigital.net's storefront. Don Wiss has done a great job of documenting all the camera shop storefronts in Brooklyn (where most of the scammers are) and Manhattan (where the few legitimate stores are). Some look somewhat dubious in spite of multi-page slick advertisments in mass-market photo magazines. Would you rather buy from this place or this one?

Here's a photo of Wawadigital.net's storefront. Don Wiss has done a great job of documenting all the camera shop storefronts in Brooklyn (where most of the scammers are) and Manhattan (where the few legitimate stores are). Some look somewhat dubious in spite of multi-page slick advertisments in mass-market photo magazines. Would you rather buy from this place or this one?

Here's a photo of Wawadigital.net's storefront. Don Wiss has done a great job of documenting all the camera shop storefronts in Brooklyn (where most of the scammers are) and Manhattan (where the few legitimate stores are). Some look somewhat dubious in spite of multi-page slick advertisments in mass-market photo magazines. Would you rather buy from this place or this one?

Here's a photo of Wawadigital.net's storefront. Don Wiss has done a great job of documenting all the camera shop storefronts in Brooklyn (where most of the scammers are) and Manhattan (where the few legitimate stores are). Some look somewhat dubious in spite of multi-page slick advertisments in mass-market photo magazines. Would you rather buy from this place or this one?

Here's a photo of Wawadigital.net's storefront. Don Wiss has done a great job of documenting all the camera shop storefronts in Brooklyn (where most of the scammers are) and Manhattan (where the few legitimate stores are). Some look somewhat dubious in spite of multi-page slick advertisments in mass-market photo magazines. Would you rather buy from this place or this one?

You nearly sent a thousand bucks to these guys: http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/h0101.h tm *Shudder* > That said, if you save $500 getting the RebelXT > (still a great camera), spend it on a lens. I just did :) Got myself a Sigma 55-200 mm, am awaiting photo-compatible weather :) Actually, the ergonomics of the RebelXT works out for me (my hands are average sized), and I just couldn't justify another $500 for the 20D. Good luck! -Henrik

You nearly sent a thousand bucks to these guys:

http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/h0101.h tm

They would have sent you the camera, (maybe), stripped of the accessories that come with it.

BTW, I found the EOS 20D to be well worth the higher price, after trying it and a RebelXT for a while. For one thing, it's much, MUCH more comfortable to hold. For another, there's a significant value in the information that's right on top of the camera, and in a way that's hard to describe, the ergonomics don't really work on the Rebel nearly as well as on the 20D.

That said, if you save $500 getting the RebelXT (still a great camera), spend it on a lens. The main reason to buy a Canon EOS is the great lenses available for it. If you're just going to get mediocre lenses, it's really not such a great value. You might actually be disappointed with your results. The EF/L lenses are what make this DSLR system so great.

Know what you're getting into.