thought it'd be interesting to see this brat brought to justice. go crazy:

"Business" Address:
Mike Warden
Po box 40282
Redford, MI 48239 US

<i>removed phone number as it's his home phone</i>

Email: [email protected]

Record label: www.conquertheworld.com

<i>removed home address</i>

a really poorly attempted scam. let me know how things turn out

[sarcasm] Well, I'm sure that Mike won't forget the little people who helped him finance his band when he makes it big. [/sarcasm]

Re: more updates
 

I just read through this entire thread, and although I already knew the outcome, it was this post from "Mike BigCD" (should be "Mike BigD*C*") that started formulating my opinion that this is fraud and not stupidity. I mean, it's like catching a pickpocket with his hand in your pants, who then says he's looking for some gum, then pulls out your wallet because it's preventing him from looking for his gum, pulls out your car keys for the same reason, keep fishing around in your pocket, and then, when you call for the police, calmly says "Oh, no, there's a ray of hope that I might find that gum, so don't bother with the police, that will just cost all of us a lot of time and money, I'm almost done here."

Good luck to eveyone in getting their money back, I hope we haven't heard the last on this one, but that only good news follows.

Shoveler

It's sh*t like this that is making me return to Brick & Mortar shopping. I'm losing faith in making online purchases.

New online retailers are getting hurt by guys like this because no one dares to make a purchase on an unknown online site. Then on the other hand going to "secure" well-known sites like Amazon.com will "cost" you and as a consequence the discounts become nonexistent leaving in actuality very little benefit and reason for shopping online other than some convenience.

And like most people in this forum right now, I want his head on a platter.

I don't think you guys have to worry about his band becoming succesful. Being signed by a major label is a ticket to financial ruin for a majority of bands. Mike may be a con artist, but in all likelihood he is way, way, way overmatched by the con(tract) lawyers that work for the labels. The copyright industry will chew him up and spit him out like a wad of chaw.

I can only say this that Mike needs to be reprimanded at the fullest extent of the law. If he indeed ran a scam which it appears that he did. To fund his band. If he isn't brought to justice then the people who got scammed by Mike are doing Mike a disservice. Mike may verb his usual BS statements but until he is brought to realizing what he did was wrong he will more or less try something like this again. You need help Mike from Mike himself by refuting your credit card orders and filing mail fraud www.usps.gov. Their site has a form. I'd also recomend filing a complaint with the IRS. I'm sure the IRS will find alot inadequecies in his accounting measures. It's considered fraud if after 30 days if one doesn't provide the services. It's called I believe failure to provide.

Also as far as his band is concerned. I for one wouldn't buy a CD of his nor recomend him to anyone. Most companies won't hire or do business with someone who has committed fraud and I believe he will have to dig himself out this one and make retributions fast.

Cool, let's all book flights and go knock on his door.

I plan on hiding all his bands future CDs in the William Shatner section :D

wow, he's only about fifteen minutes from me. If I had ordered from him, I would certainly be literally knocking on his door. One could call the Redford police perhaps?

Anyone who says his band is the next Nirvana is a f-ing idiot.

His band is obviously pretty popular in your area then, right, badlieut? :)

Seems like he put http://www.bigcd.com back online! He probably needs more money from us to support his band! He added an update to his page. Here it is:

2. Shipping policy change - Only use Priority mail if you are ordering 1 or 2 items on a ticket. If you order more than 2 items and select priority mail they will be sent out at complimentary free standard rate rate. Please understand we cannot afford to ship multiple packages priority mail when your only paying a small flat rate.

I guess he wants more money so you can upgrade your shipping and he will send it out to you!

updates....
 

Hello I was not around a computer for 3 days so I had no idea this was going on here. I do not appreciate the level of personal attacks here. I have a personal life you know and if I spend money I make on myself for dinner, for bills or for my record company then it's my business. BigCD finances my record company and it pays for my trips to taco bell or whatever else I pay for.

I don't have all the money for the orders. I never even got most of it up until the other day. They released some of it to me but they still are holding $10,000 of your money which is to pay for orders.

I am still trying to work it all out to get the orders out but Ingram doesn't care much or put much of a concern on the orders. I also had big discrepency with my bank as it appeared than the money that half.com sent to me was reversed then taken out for 2 days my bank account read -$36,000. I could not even cash a check from some CD sales because the account was on hold. So instead of raking myself in personal torment over this situation I had band practice a couple days and only now have I returned.

I am not a thief, nor a scam artist and I'm definitely not a criminal so it
would be nice to not hear people calling me that. I don't have your money
Ingram has it holding it pending what we decide to do between the three
parties. If anything I'm guilty of having hot pots in the oven and having to
divide my attention to both of them. The worst comes I'll declare bankruptcy
because I won't let this ruin my life because it's not in my hands. I am a
small fish and there are much larger ones in control. For god sakes I live
with my mom so i can cut all my expenses so I can operate while the business
grows. The business can't function unless people let it function. My credit
was revoked because people did not pay me money they owed my card processor
that is. Not to mention my advertising on dVd talk, my campaigns on
pricegrabber.com, bargainflix, and dvdpricesearch.com, my server and
internet bill they are all monthly expenses that money was taken out for.

Well anyways I have so many things to catch up on. Nothing is going to be
resolved today we tried to conference call in half, ingram but they didn't
answer.

Mike

Re: updates....
 

:hscratch:

Re: updates....
 

You knew of all these problems so you decided to leave for three days?

This is incorrect, because you are not spending your money, you are spending other people's money. Any problems you've had with the business were caused by yourself. Leaving orders outstanding -- your fault. Problems with your merchant account -- your fault, you violated a few rules there by charging before shipping (illegal) and also by NOT TELLING PEOPLE what was going on. Problems with half.com -- your fault, because you apparently didn't ship out products (see the other thread).

Whom? I like how when someone else has money that doesn't belong to them, it's ours. When you have money that doesn't belong to you, it's yours...

Pretty obvious you don't either.

Hiding from problems apparently didn't help -- strange isn't it? Often when people ignore problems and the people behind them everything magically gets all better again.


This is interesting. Ingram, a distributor, is holding your money. How did they get your money?

Nice. Just shows you as the stand-up fellow you are.

You seem to be the biggest problem. Living with your mother is irrelevant, but it does clarify a few things.

Wait, you are the good guy! People didn't pay you for products you didn't ship! It's all clear now. You got to watch out for people on this board, they often have outlandish demands. You know, like the products they paid for.

All expenses you knew about and you accepted. Stop complaining, it's your choice, and you clearly made it poorly.

You say there are three parties -- you, half, and ingram. So who else was on the phone with you, or but is that the royal we?

In other posts you always complain about waiting to get paid -- credit card companies, half.com, whatever. You know half.com's payment policies, why would you expect them to change for you? Credit card companies have regulations on when you get paid, why would you expect them to change for you?

To be completely honest, I've seen a lot of people like you. They come and go, complain about stupid and controlable circumstances that they just couldn't put up with. Face facts, Mike, you aren't mature enough to run a business. You ignore it and customers, you take funds before shipping products, and then make up shoddy excuses and blame anyone but yourself. You're the one who's caused the problems, you're the one who can't deal with them, and you're the one who's screwing over a lot of people.

Two years ago, you might have gotten start-up capital, but face it Mike, everyone's gotten a little smarter, and intelligent people can see you as exactly what you are.

Re: updates....
 

Ummm.. and you run an internet based business.. I find that statement very comical.

Your telling my you can't take a day to email all the customer's money you have and tell them why they have no product after 3 weeks. That's simply unprofessional and dishonest and my credit card company agree's.

I'm not responding any longer.
 

This is the last response you will see from me. I did not post here to become personally attacked, have any such personal information posted so you can call here and threaten me with who knows what.

I'm just not going to answer the phone anymore or get it disconnected I really don't care at this point after having so many threatening phone calls people swearing at my mom calling at 4 am in the morning swearing on my machine.

I'm tired of it and I am not going to take the abuse anymore. I did not post here so you could personally pick apart every word I wrote or attack me personally. this is business and this is not handled in this manner.

I'm not even going to pretend to care anymore about anything with this attitude from people.

Re: I'm not responding any longer.
 

:hscratch: Who's doing the mishandling here. Is it us who have paid hard-earned money for nothing, or you who has used our money to buy tacos??? :hscratch:

Goodbye... WTF are you still doing on the DVDTalk forums, anyway? Shouldn't you be packing boxes for shipment or running away to Mexico (and thus eating all the tacos you want)?

Re: I'm not responding any longer.
 

And now he takes his toys and goes home.

Has anyone complained to Half.com about his selling practices? He is clearly violating the seller agreement by not shipping items untill he receives the cash.

That means he is confirming an order, and then not shipping them within the next business day as he's supposed to. Being that he's admitted this, he should have his seller status revoked immediately from half.com.

Re: I'm not responding any longer.
 

Ever seen a man fall out his chair at work holding his stomach and laughing? Well my co-workers just did.

I think this is the real reason that BigCD.com is in trouble. This is a quote from Mike at his record label site. http://www.conquertheworld.com Mike has now deleted the quote from his site, but it was there as late as yesterday.

CTW will always be a record label as long as I have some money from some kind of source and a band inspires me to spend it without any real hopes of really getting it back. It's never been about the money just the music and the friends. I am sure the website will be re designed sometime soon, it's been quite neglected over the past few months. I have had to spend a lot of time on BigCD.com and learning how it can grow. Unfortunately I took too much money from bigcd.com and put it into CTW and now I'm experiencing financing problems with the company itself. It's good thing and it's a bad thing. It's good because the Radio Holiday CD was released with this money and that's amazing because it helps the progression of the band and the chance of the band really getting big seem to be quite high. So hell once we get our 5 million dollar advance from some big label I can pay the $10,000 I owe to bigcd.com to get it paid back. The bad thing is right now there are 500 DVDs just sitting there waiting for the homes of the customers who ordered them. I wish I was smarter with proper business and money management, but honestly that really would not be me. Choose either for the final sentence, "Maybe it's time to change" or "Who cares you are punk rock?"


I think the above quote by Mike shows who is really at fault in the BigCD.com debacle.

I completely agree, but I think another part of the problem is that maybe Mike honestly believes that it was simply "bad business decision" and not intentional criminal fraud that led to this point. I think there's a chance that he's simply a young idiot who thought it would be OK to "borrow" some money from BigCD.com to use for his band, in the naive belief that it would be a short term thing, and now that he simply cannot replace those funds, he is looking at all of the reasons for that and assigning blame where he sees it, not realizing that this is all the natural consequence of his criminal action. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that he isn't responsible and shouldn't be held accountable, but I'm starting to believe that he believes his own BS. Maybe its just because he wants to believe it, and view himself as the victim, but whatever the case, I find it quite pathetic. I also honestly believe that anyone with a pending order that has already been charged will be doing him the biggest favor of his life by contesting the charges and reporting this to the authorities, or he'll simply continue this pattern of behavior on an increasingly larger scale until even more damage is done. This little (seld-admitted) idiot needs tough love and he needs it now.

Caveat Emptor
 

After reading this thread my take is that Mike's not the only one who can learn something from this debacle.

Bottom line: if you're willing to send your money to an entity you know nothing about (how many folks would have ordered from BigCD had they known the "company" was a guy living with his mom who only gets online every three days or so?) in order to save a couple bucks on a DVD, you assume a certain amount of risk.

Which of course in no way excuses anything fraudulent/criminal/stupid Mike may have done. But I know I myself am going to limit my online purchases in the future to companies with established track records of customer satisfaction.

This has to be the most entertaining thread I have ever read here. Every day there are new revelations!


What no one has pointed out is that Mike just returned here and bascially said "Oops, sorry. I've been away for 3 days and was unaware of these issues."

That post doesn't really explain why his site was unavailable on 2/12-2/14 with this message: "Sorry, BigCD.com is closed. BigCD.com can no longer take orders. We are being forced out of operation for the time being."


Mike doesn't even mention that... what the hell? Shouldn't this merit at least a brief comment? You shut your site down for two days with an "out of business" message -- and then you are away from a computer for 3 days? :lol:

Anyway, I think everyone (except Mike) is on the same page here. Clearly, everyone should immediately contact their CC company to get the charges reversed... actually, I think that was a pretty obvious course of action when this thread first started and we all got a sense of what this "store" was like. This individual is unable to run a business and amazingly unable to accept any sort of responsibility for his own actions.

I never thought I would thank Oderbox.com, but I do. If I hadn't had such a bad experience with their new site, I might have tried BigCD.com.

This guy is the typical narcissist. He is focused only on himself and blames everyone else for his problems (and tries to draw everyone from the real issues, instead of him to taking responsibility for his and others (half.com or anyone else) who are preventing him from fulfilling the obligation to his customers.

The fact that he still lives with his Mom should tell you that he doesn't have to stand on his own two feet. His first priority should be getting a job that pays the bills (rent for instance), then try to make his dreams come true (band or internet business).

Several have mentioned that they are not going to risk their future DVD purchases to save a few bucks....I think that is sound advice.

Good Luck
Ron

Funny thing here is that I placed an order with OrderBox (seemingly back from the ashes) well after an order with BigCD. Well, here I sit with the disc from OrderBox in my hot little hands but I still await (ha ha) a disc from BigCD.

BTW, in an ironic twist you can file a complaint online with the Attorney General's office in BigCD's home state here:
https://www.ag.state.mi.us/forms/w3htc_c01_new.asp

So, online misdeeds can be dealt with online :)

I'm sorry for anybody who got scammed here. But other than that I've found it very educational.

In reading through this thread I've been able to watch the entire arc of a scam: announcement, happy initial customers, unavoidable delays and requests for more time, acceptance then growing into angry retorts, and the dramatic poof as the perpetrator vanishes.

Last week I learned that merchant accounts keep a large reserve of your money. This week I learned why. They need to protect themselves in case you want to buy tacos.

I hope people get their money back, and I hope that no one placed any large orders. Getting ten cents back on the dollar from $20 would be sad, but nothing major. Getting that much back on $500 would really bite.

Hey, he can get a headstart on his new career here:

http://www.acme.com/licensemaker/

:)

CW

I'm just disappointed he was banned. :( I'm not suggesting he shouldn't have been, but it was fascinating to see what he would say next.

Seems you can make a lot of money by sending him (MikeCTW) a dollar...

http://www.sushifaq.com/wwwboard/messages/32.shtml
http://users2.cgiforme.com/AmericanS...sages/117.html
http://eval1.crc.uiuc.edu/edpsy392/3...ssages/90.html
http://www.goskinewengland.com/wwwbo...sages/180.html

The list goes on and on and on and...

That's awesome. Good work :)

Extra taco money! ;)

Oh well Bigcd,

A Capital One investigator will be contacting you shortly.

Hi everybody,
I have been keeping up with this thread and feel sorry for everybody who got scammed. I reread the owners stories several times and they do not add up at all. Just like another member suggested, the owner could not have been away from his computer for three days since the front page changed.

Here is my suggestion and I hope that I am not out of my league for suggesting it. First, he still has his Web site up meaning more people may buy dvds without knowing that they may not get them. I did a simple nslookup on his Web site, and it showed that his hosting is done by radius03.lai-ca.icg.net. Using the last part of the URL means that the company icg.net is hosting his Web site. I would think that if enough people write the company and tell them of the situation that they would stop hosting his site.

Again, I hope that I don't get flamed for suggesting this. I just don't want to see anybody get ripped off.

I've also disputed the charge with Capital One.

actually his hosting company is www.cybrmall.net

[email protected] is who I would contact.

Thanks Pilot! Sorry about giving incorrect information.

Not to worry. He responded to my above post by private email within hours.

...and? Don't keep me waiting with baited breath!

updates...
 

Why you people are acting like 5 year olds really amazes me. If anyone is getting ripped off it's me here. I don't have the money for these orders the distributor has it now. The card processor also has $10,000 of it and they will not release it to me. I have already attempted that. The more people contact the credit card companies as well the worse getting any of that money back will be. You people are causing this delay as well because the more complaints to the card companies the less likely they will be to release any money.

READ HERE IN BIG LETTERS: I DO NOT PERSONALLY HAVE YOUR MONEY, or MONEY FOR THESE ORDERS. INGRAM and CARDSERVICE INTERNATIONAL has it. So go threaten them if you want I really don't care. Neither one of them care about your orders and the way I have been personally attacked and degraded and mistreated here I'm gonna start to not to care about them either.

These orders will not be released until the entire batch is reconciled and calculated. At that time Ingram will only release orders for what money is available. Since money has been held from me and since I was behind on payments there won't be enough there. Originally they assured me that we would be willing to work something out however as time continues the only thing to work out is who is going to fund bigcd to get it on it's feet again. If no one is going to then it will close upon itself and there isn't anything I personally can do about it.

I haven't emailed anyone back because up until just today I thought I had been screwed again by half.com by stealing money back from me when in reality my bank froze my account. So now I have some more frozen assets that I cannot send out to process orders because of big business and banks and what not. So just more problems and not solutions.

No complaints to any BBB' FTC, lawyer etc is going to do anything because I have not done anything wrong. In fact I am the only one in this entire chain that really gives a flying **** about your pending orders and that is the god damn truth. Bank doesn't care, Ingram doesn't care unless they are getting paid upfront, Card processor sure doesn't care whatsoever about the 10,000 they extracted from your orders to put up a security shield.

I don't answer the phone anymore because I have nothing new to say. No investors have come to help bail me out and nobody has provided any additional funding. There is nothing I can personally do. absolutely not a single thing I can do.

The store is open again because if I close it I can't update the order status system and when the orders ship again IF they decide to ship them finally people could not see the updates.
Hopefully I find the funding somewhere to keep it going.

I would appreciate if the personal attacks would stop because it will get you no where and do nothing to faciliate the business getting back on it's feet.

Mike

Re: updates...
 

Still shifting the blame? YOU TOOK THE MONEY, YOU GAVE IT TO THEM. It is your fault. Did you not read your contacts well enough?

Neither do you. You ignore people for days straight, don't respond to emails, and most importantly, don't ship out the promised product. You can't start not to care, you already don't, unless it's you.

Haha. Are you serious? Because if you are, you are VERY diluded.

But it's okay that you're still taking other people's money for products you know can't ship... right... we feel so bad for you.

I know a hell of a lot of people that would have liked to never delt with a sorry, pathetic person like you... but nobody always gets what they want.

It's your fault, Mikey, accept it, appologize, and move on.

PS - Can I still send you $1 for that informative money making report? Nice to know you'd screw people over however you can... guess this is nothing new for you!