Employer advice? - Someone puts other people's artwork on their portfolio
Hi,
I'm employer here and have ethics question.
I have a former artist (call him "J") who added someone's artwork and claim it to be his own work.
I have vacancy here, so I receive artwork (low-res PNGs) and past works as samples of what they did, resumes - photocopies of certificates, etc.
I received many resumes from artists seeking employment - "S". "S" showed me his portfolio and I asked about this similar screenshot from "J's" portfolio.
"S" is on this forum too. Four screenshots from "J" came from "S's" portfolio.
Since this is an artist forum, please give advice what I should do next.
I'm employer here and have ethics question.
I have a former artist (call him "J") who added someone's artwork and claim it to be his own work.
I have vacancy here, so I receive artwork (low-res PNGs) and past works as samples of what they did, resumes - photocopies of certificates, etc.
I received many resumes from artists seeking employment - "S". "S" showed me his portfolio and I asked about this similar screenshot from "J's" portfolio.
"S" is on this forum too. Four screenshots from "J" came from "S's" portfolio.
Since this is an artist forum, please give advice what I should do next.
This discussion has been closed.
Replies
Don't hire him and put his name here for all of us to know never to hire them.
They need to be made an example of, point blank period.
We need to scare the living shit out of people from now on with law suits or something similar to that affect to limit these type of activities.
He has many friends to defend him (btw, all frauds), so this thread will be heavily trolled by him/ or his friends.
In fact, I will not be surprised about his friends coming into this thread trying to defend him or troll him.
Facts:
1) The name Josh Minger is an assumed identity. That is because he has no social security number, or tries to bluff his way through things.
Uses an exploit in PayPal called donations and always asks for free assets or money, to claim as his own.
2) Claims to go to University, but has no degree.
3) He likes to pull heart-strings. He says he has 2 children. Actually, he lives in a rented house where a divorcee has two children. He was given an eviction notice some time ago.
4) Is known to frequent this forum, unknown name, asking to join him to make an FPS or small game.
He is known to rip people off, that is, asking you to make a huge terrain, make your own assets for him, and sell it to others.
He is known to have no skills, nor skill-sets. He is unable to do 2D nor 3D.
What he does, is that he depends on others.
5) The owner who rented the place to a group of individuals, has no recollection of anyone with that face living there, so beware that his on-line identity is different from his real-life photo.
6) Beware of this person as he takes your artwork and gives it to you/ or others to do. He doesn't do it. He contracts it to others to do it. After that, he dumps you.
7) Claims ownerships of lots of things. He got a fight with one of the modellers here I had to let him go
You heard it. He has plenty of scripts because he downloads them.
So the first screenshots you may receive are actually vendor's screenshots.
If you are his friend, you might be tasked to do modifications for supposed scripts. These scripts are for-pay (at US$1,000/script). But in reality - he does nothing and some of his friends codes it for him. That friend or friends don't get paid.
9) He puts his address as a cemetery where nobody lives. (Google it up)
Beware!
The purpose of him joining you or your team is to steal assets and steal your codes.
This is the domain of a site which he brought and holding hostage.
That is:
- Buyer asks Josh for artwork.
- Slave comes along and does artwork for Josh.
- Josh gives your work to the Slave
- Josh collects money from Buyer and then gives nothing to Slave.
http://www.priongames.com/
http://www.destinygamer.com/
(all goes to suspended URLs)
Currently Josh is busy sending banking-viruses and spyware to other people. Beware. Opening those supposed games will lead to your computer being infected.
Beware, as he does not pay and often disputes the payments.
https://www.elance.com/e/priongames/
Spread the word. we'll do that as well.
If you are uncertain about hiring him, invite him in and give him a supervised art test. If he makes it as per your expectations and in time, consider him (but not hire him completely.) This art test will be the leverage against him so you will have some sort of proof of why not to hire him because assumingly he will come back with this question.
On second thought, do not hire him, let others know to look out for this person.
EDIT: There are no game developers in Pakistan. Hell they still use black and white screened monitor with the huge back.
Now if this thread is going to be flooded I would suggest that Admins should make a note of this person and close this. But then again its all up to them.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll have to change my passwords and run ccleaner 5 times to make sure that those links I clicked above me, dont harm my pc.
It was so bad that people were wondering whether "A" took a holiday or just went off.
Maybe I'll ask "A" to come on-line and attest to this incident.
So all links to him are dead, but beware of a 33-years, male, old person pretending to be a 21-22 years old person.
(alias: Robert J. Smith, Robert M. Lee).
Josh tells often he has no jobs (actually he has jobs - ripped off people who he asked for upfront fees) and tries to get part-time jobs.
So don't be surprised another person from Ohio, West Virginia or Kentucky will come on-line and then ask for free terrains, models, artworks from you.
Just...Stop. We get it. We will be confronting him if he shows up here.
sincerly Josh...I mean Drew
People just use your gut feeling and common sense, when dealing things like this and form your own opinions and biases on the person.
Strikes me as odd that the info is only being fed into the thread by 1 person.
You think?
Anyways he was reported few times already. I think Admins and mods are on vacation, so its best for us to read 3 top posts and move on without posting here. Or ignore this thread as a whole.
2. The sites are suspended.
why should I care? You asked for employer advice, ask a lawyer, I'm sure they'll tell you to never badmouth a former employee or contractor unless you are prepared to go to court over it.
Exactly, it's only illegal if he doesn't have proof to back it up.
its illegal. Its called "defamation of character".
I think you should ask a lawyer and get him punished on this way
otherwise to punish someone in public could have consequences.
That you dont hire this person - is beyond question
The rest of the info after who he is and him using others art, made you look super vindictive and/or paranoid.
I work in the IT world and posting things like this follow you when looking for employment or trying to hire employees.
Defamation of character is caused by two things, libel and slander.
slander is verbal
libel is written
in BOTH cases, if it can be proved that the statements are true (ie. can be backed up by fact), then it's covered under the rule of fair comment.
for example:
I call john a lying son of a bitch. i tell the person who is thinking of hiring him that not only did he steal work, he then attempted to get a job with it. i go a step further, and inform potential employers of this as well.
john finds out about this, and tries to sue for defamation of character. if i can prove that what i've said is true... that i have original copies of the work he stole, or documents which otherwise prove his guilt. then the case would be thrown out.
if i cannot prove what i've said is true, then he would have a strong case that i'd have a hard time walking away from without severe bruising.
If the guy did this, totally sucks, but be careful...your laying on pretty heavily with slander...all you have to do is say he stole art...we dont need several posts about it.
EDIT: Dont mean to piss anyone off here but I thought this link might be useful in this discussion since things seem to get back on the track.
For statement of libel, the statements here are true and correct. Not one word was stated extra and all stated were true and correct.
We tried to serve a lawsuit to this guy - We put it at his company address. But that guy put his company address as a cemetry. Nobody lives there, except three security guards who take rounds guarding the funeral parlor and cemetry there.
Then the locations where person "J" puts as his alternate addresses, the landlords there have no recollection of anyone living there with that face. They did however, serve eviction notices to two tenants there, but those were not "J".
I put it here as "Employee advice", since I asked is this normal?
Do people often do this? In fact, we get several people looking for employment who try to scam us with fake credentials. We get really, really weary hiring artists.
Is it normal that people take others people artwork and claim it as their own?
What would you do to prevent this? Does it happen regularly?
Is it normal that others sub-sub-sub contract their art-work to cheap Indian Pakistan artists via Elance, or sub-contract to others and do not pay them?
Is it normal for people to take months on end to do art-work? :thumbdown:
no
To quote advice from your other thread: "As for general advice, dont be afraid to pay a bit more to get quality/stable people."
If you have trouble finding quality individuals go with a reputable outsourcing studio. Or team up/hire someone who is knowledgeable about art to be your outsourcing manager. I would have the same issues trying to hire programmers, especially if I was looking for the cheapest rates.
Or give him an art test?
We settled with an artist and forgive his debts since he had no means to pay. Another needs no mention because his mug-shot is disseminated on (state) department of corrections website.
We were paying US$25/hour and onwards. But we never expected many artists to take advantage of us in such manner.
You can work back cost of over US$3,000 in supposed hours when in our horror we find that unpaid persons was doing the work for "J" and "J" billing us for so many fictional hours.
(Edited for clarifications)
There are two people here on PolyCount hired by us. We would be very last persons not to pay them or mistreat them. lol.
Reputation is everything.
I also believe that your ongoing harassment was noted as illegal last time around.
I even had Paypal tell me you have had fraudalant attempts in the past.
I worked with sally Peck for roughly 2 months.
For one I do not make 3D assets, I am a GUI artist. I also make all assets in Photoshop.
Sally you say I am 30+ years old? My real name is not Josh Minger? All and that I have no social security #?
Also my kids you heard in the background when we were in Skype chats were all make believe too right?
I suppose me having an EIN for my business as well as the secretary of states signature on it was fake too as well right?
Maybe a little lawsuit against you for this ongoing slandering of my name will better suite your toxic imprints of your very on fraud onto people.
I may have not seen this thread until just now, but if i would have sooner I would have papers sent to you within days by a lawyer. Small claims court can reach the Philipines sally, just be over seas does not protect you.
You seem to be the only person that complained on my business, my work done, etc.
Your personal vendetta with me is forcing me to take further steps to have to put behind bars.
What you are doing is very much illegal.
Not having my sites up must me one thing Sally, maybe I do not have my hosting being paid right now due to not having the time to maintain them? Exactly.
This makes how many forums you have tried to run to for this nonsense?
If you guys want to see the messages from sally go to Unity3d forums and search for the username EskimoJoe, that;s her account. Mine is Prion Games.
I could glady show you the same information I provided to a lawyer, Unity Admins, and to Paypal.
If you want to take this further Sally, you better expect a letter in your email soon.
That is all that I feel I need to say, I could go all day, but this is quite meaningless as there are so many of these so called buyers being the so called victims. Well all you need to know is, is that I had the issue dealt with with the proper people. her trying to continue her Slander with get her one thing. The law.
As for me not even being real, that is quite amusing as I have a Paypal business account with linked socials, and business EIN's.
You have no skills, no modelling skills, no development skills at all.
Both YOU and I was banned at the Unity Community Forums. Remember?
Both YOU and I were left with 1 week cooling off. Remember?
You were using Warez to do your business.
Still using warez to do your business?
Do you want Unity to verify your serial number?
Do you want me to bring in Unity to my lawsuit and testify against your perjury?
Also, you perjury against me when telling falsehoods with Unity.
Your websites were unavailable because you could not pay anything, you were evicted from your house. Your "office" is non-existent and goes to grave-yard.
People can easily google PrionGames and see it is non-existent and is suspended.
The WHOIS goes to a Graveyard.
Nobody lives in Pancake road except a cemetery there.
What games did PrionGames publish?
So many years passed by and no games. Wonder why?
What you are doing is illegal too, asking for money and doing nothing.
Cheating everyone. No wonder you have no game-development job for many years.
How is your sham-business promoting Slaves of Rome?
Do you want to contact the owner to verify your so-called publishing deal?
How about your non-existent game with XenArch?
Do you want to contact the owners to find the truth?
How about your sham game-development with Unkind World?
How about all the old assets you took from them and then used it in your similar game?
How about your funny accounting trick to make a sub-company "Digital X interactive"?
How about your sham game-development with Legends of Etherell?
Do you want to contact the owners to verify how you messed their game?
Go ahead, sue me. I want your house address and office address so I can serve you my lawsuit to you too, since you do not live in the same address you are in now and all the past addresses you gave are invalid.
Tell your lawyer to take note of this, especially the PrionGames WHOIS going to a grave-yard. It must be nice for someone to put their WHOIS as a graveyard and perjury (tell lies) to people.
Funny how your "lawyer" does not contact the opposing party.
I wonder who did the works that Josh was supposed to do?
Did your friends do it instead of you?
I wonder why you withheld their money and perjury to them?
Your friends expected to be paid, not JoshMinger keep their money instead.
Nice of you to keep their money
I think your small claims court should be aware of this information against you.
You really cannot sue me because you got evicted from your house. Remember?
You make the same threats to all those people who you worked with.
I would be more than happy to bring in Slaves of Rome owner, Legends of Etherell owners, Unkind World owners and your friends to testify against you.
If you google the address you'll find links to for example realtor.com and homes.com that show you the address is actually a 3 bedroom house.
No properties found
Homes for Sale on Pancake Clarkson Rd in Rogers, OH
http://www.homes.com/
Pancake Clarkson Rd in Rogers, OH
You have entered an invalid location.
He don't live there.
His office address is invalid as nobody is there by that name.
Phone number on WHOIS:
Invalid phone number.
I have never lied and Unity already favored me in your attempts.
Just because you live in the Philipines does not change the way the laws function country to country.
The initial warning was enough, but there wasn't even proof for that warning in the first place.........
This doesn't feel right. The OP feels like someone with a grudge, not a 'concerned employer'.
For spectacular claims, you're going to need spectacular evidence. :thumbup:
Please see your last email. Where is your address so I can serve you papers?
I cannot serve you papers on your parent's house and your previous residences,
since you don't live there anymore.
If you feel it is harassment, please don't put your parent's house address in public WHOIS as your office and/or business address, since that is out of State.
Your phone number (on WHOIS) is disconnected.
Would you be so kind for your lawyer(s) to contact us for a pre-trial mediation and stop harassing me and my employees?
Also, my lawyer would like to see evidences you gave to Unity to support your favor since any perjury related to this will be used as evidence against you.