The-Con-Artist.com

[Evan]

Hey guys, I found this new playing card company on Facebook and now I have found their website. They have not release any products yet but will be launching some products "within the next couple months."
They have contests on their Facebook page to win decks so get over there!
The decks are very limited and they think that they will be rare.

Here is the website: http://The-Con-Artist.com/
Here is their Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Con-ArtistCom/330147213678457

[dmbaggs]

hmmm... it's hard to tell what I think about this company from what little they have to show. They could be one of the next greats or they could be just another wanna be hopping on playing card bandwagon. I'd like to entertain the thought that they could be great though We'll see.

[Paul Carpenter]

Yay, let's all cheer for incredible vagueness and abstract promises of incredibleness!

I really hate contests where you have to put someone else's cheesy and vague text as if it's coming from your own mouth. Hate it enough that while I'd love a free deck I just can't participate.

I do hope that the glaringly obvious Matrix+Apple Computer theme is not indicative of their deck as that's about 6 years late on the design spectrum...

[JimmyJohns]

I'm sick of this "Skulkor Type" marketing shenanigans, ..."Like" us, follow us on Twitter, blah, blah...But wait there's more , you need to change that and that, maybe even your last name , or post  things like this, quote from their FB page:
"OK the first 150 people to like this page and update their status to these exact words "Holy Cripes you guys need to look at and like this page. It has some wicked awesome things coming that have never ever been touched or thought about in the magic communuty".He He, you need to post the exact words, they say, so don't even think to correct the misspelling in bold
If you have good content to show, advertise wise, in the end people would follow you and yes would "Like" you.
But the only thing you can see there is a one page website that can be done better than that in less than five minutes.

[loldudex2]

Although the incredible vagueness, I entered myself.  Figued for a free deck of cards why not. Heck, I'd do this for a pack of bikes! Thank you Evan for showing this to us!

[xela]

I had to work day and night to get my fans by showing teasers, concepts, etc. It's much, much easier to get people to like you when you show them what they should be liking.

I think this site can go one of two ways, either very awesome or very terrible.

The all-caps status updates don't look good though. My advice to the owner of the site, if he or she should end up reading this, is to give people something to look forward to, and not keep it vague and "underground." When you are first arriving on the scene, you can't create hype by acting like the hype is predetermined. At the end of the day, are you selling me hype or products?

Also, transparency does wonders. I've liked a lot of the pages that I do because I enjoy having a more personal connection with the page owner. I have yet to give Skulkor a bother, for example, because I have absolute no idea what their staff consists of.

Also, when I see statuses spammed with your marketing campaign, I tend to get annoyed, and I feel like most people do. I'm sure if I give away tons of decks I can go get people to post "CHECK OUT THE HARLEQUIN DECK!!!" on their updates, but won't everyone see past the ruse as soon as they see the same thing copy+pasted over and over?

And since when is growing your Facebook fan page about giving away goods?! They're tossing out 150 decks and getting what, maybe 100 likes? Damn, for that amount of money I can grab myself 1K fans via advertising.

Regardless, 150 is a darn admirable number. Kudos to whoever there is dropping the dough on that.

[sinsandman]

I actually like the marketing style of Skulkor. Everyone started sticking to the same routine, Skulkor at least mixed it up a little with a healthy heap of mystery. I'm down with that...kinda like before Slipknot unmasked, great music without faces. I regard Skulkor in the same.

[shutupdangit]

Am I the only one that doesn't like the background of their website? Just seems way too much.

I also don't buy into the "copy paste this into your status" style of marketing, especially if it's to get a deck I haven't seen yet.

[Paul Carpenter]

And since when is growing your Facebook fan page about giving away goods?! They're tossing out 150 decks and getting what, maybe 100 likes? Damn, for that amount of money I can grab myself 1K fans via advertising.

150 decks for 150 likes is a pretty poor ROI. Perhaps by being a bit more personable they could get 150 likes by giving away 1 item.

I'm stingy with my Facebook Liking, so they have to show me something cool before they get it.

[Gunshy1]

I actually like the marketing style of Skulkor. Everyone started sticking to the same routine, Skulkor at least mixed it up a little with a healthy heap of mystery. I'm down with that...kinda like before Slipknot unmasked, great music without faces. I regard Skulkor in the same.

Being an iowa boy i always knew who everyone was in slipknot; knida made their music even more personal to me. (they are SICK live)

Maybe they are just testing the waters seeing how many people are interested. i personally have always hated facebook marketing campaigns; which is one of the reasons i got rid of my facebook.

[Kanped]

//off-topic

I always found Slipknot to be 2 talented musicians (Mick Thomson, Corey) 2 mostly competent musicians (Joey and Paul Grey) and 5 backing dancers

//off-topic

[Linguist_]

Maybe I'm just getting old and moody, but I really dislike Facebook marketing. I think it's fine for sharing developments and new products, but the whole competition thing just seems really disorganised and annoying. It mostly consists of fake accounts/people who probably aren't even old enough to be allowed on Facebook spamming comments with poorly executed English, ending in a bicker about who got in the first x number of replies or whatever.

If it is something easy like 'What is the answer to this hypothetical question that has a definitive answer that is not abstract in any way?' then I'd participate. But the whole 'tag yourself and some buddies' or 'show a video of you liking this page as you jump off a building' don't tend to appeal to me.

Nevertheless, I 'liked' their Facebook page. I'll try my best to wade through the 90% nonsense to find the stuff that actually informs me about a product that I may purchase.

And don't even get me started on Twitter. That is like a foreign language to me.

[xela]

Maybe I'm just getting old and moody, but I really dislike Facebook marketing. I think it's fine for sharing developments and new products, but the whole competition thing just seems really disorganised and annoying. It mostly consists of fake accounts/people who probably aren't even old enough to be allowed on Facebook spamming comments with poorly executed English, ending in a bicker about who got in the first x number of replies or whatever.

If it is something easy like 'What is the answer to this hypothetical question that has a definitive answer that is not abstract in any way?' then I'd participate. But the whole 'tag yourself and some buddies' or 'show a video of you liking this page as you jump off a building' don't tend to appeal to me.

Nevertheless, I 'liked' their Facebook page. I'll try my best to wade through the 90% nonsense to find the stuff that actually informs me about a product that I may purchase.

And don't even get me started on Twitter. That is like a foreign language to me.

Twitter is baffling to me. I have one, but my Twitter following pales immensely in comparison to the Facebook folk.

I try to do a mix of "tag yourself" and actually posting content for people to partake in. I spent quite a bit of time talking with Marcus from E, who deals with their social media stuff, and he taught me a lot about how to work it. He brought in thousands and thousands of new fans to the E page. None of the tips included giving away vast amounts of goods. Even for fans, that may seem cool in the short-run, but in the long-run it leads to the business taking huge losses and not being able to dish out quality products.

Skulkor had a mix of good and bad marketing. Spamming YouTube accounts with messages was bad marketing. Getting people to change their profile pictures was good marketing in the sense that it makes people remember them. As much as it annoyed me, I know exactly what their logo looks like now.

[Kanped]

https://twitter.com/#!/xdelamuertex

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ5yIZZgv8c&feature=plcp&context=C42b2bf9VDvjVQa1PpcFNDKbgpME_anZyinsxQ_HUanyetS5eP5Io%3D

5 mins research suggests that it's this guy's site.

[Lara Krystle "Lane"]

I guess I will have to wait till a few hours before I can view facebook or whatever blocked site because my VPN only works in the morning... meh. But yeah I'm going to have a look at this New THING. ***sigh*** I tried the skulkor thing once... the whole "change your profile photo" thing... but after that I stopped.

Facebook has a great number of people and its practically almost free advertising.

Twitter.... well I'm not sure on that but I'm on it anyway for future sake... but I'm not entirely sure on how to touch base on twitter marketing.
but anyway once I wake up tomorrow morning I will have a look at this site.

[Belk]

Sadly I have trouble getting into this sort of marketing, so while I'm Sure they can round up a following, I don't see them becoming much as of right now.

[AceGambit]

Powered by InstantPage® from GoDaddy.com

This inspires so little confidence, I'm not sure I can find the words to describe.

[RandyButterfield]

https://twitter.com/#!/xdelamuertex

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ5yIZZgv8c&feature=plcp&context=C42b2bf9VDvjVQa1PpcFNDKbgpME_anZyinsxQ_HUanyetS5eP5Io%3D

5 mins research suggests that it's this guy's site.

If it is that guy, his Twitter feed promotes a Kickstarter game project a bunch of times (with 0 pledges!).
It only has one image, a horrible looking logo! It looks like the same guy in the Kickstarter project creater bio.

http://kck.st/zb6fBQ

thanks, Randy

[Kanped]

The site was registered at go daddy by someone calling themselves 'Hidden One', but using the email address xdelamuertex@hotmail.com

I don't see anyone else calling themselves xdelamuertex anywhere online, and the guy is apparently a magician of sorts, so add 2 and 2 together, I think this is the guy.

There's an xdelamuertex eBay account that has prior purchases from playing card and body building suppliers (i.e. looks very much like the same guy) that was closed shortly after selling a bunch of jewellery that was apparently fake and 'smelt badly'.

It looks very much like he's behind the kickstarter games.  It also very much looks like he isn't a programmer, graphics designer, musician etc. etc. and nobody else is involved.  It looks very much like his choice of website name is not intended to be ironic.

It also looks like he has a habit of going on forums and advertising his sites as if he's just stumbled across them and thought they seemed interesting.  How exactly did you find this poorly search optimized site, Addictz?

I'm not accusing you of anything here, just wondering if you know the guy.  As far as I can tell, the only forum on which you're both members is T11 and you've only posted in the same thread once and never spoken to or about each other.  You just seem overly excited about what is, pretty obviously, at best a really poor product and at worst a balls-out scam.

[Paul Carpenter]

I just LOVE statements like this one: "Currently here at Snow Dart Studios, there has been quite a bit of buzz about what we are doing. "

Where is this buzz, exactly? Certainly not in popular media. I never heard of you until someone happened to Google your project because you seem to be a moron trying to run some con. Oh wait, I know, it's huge buzz amongst the guys you drink beer with! And your mom! That's right, i forgot. So much buzz. It's overwhelming.

If you asking for $85,000 on Kickstarter you need one HELL of a lot more than wishes and dreams. Jeepers. I'm totally for creative people making things a reality but fer crying out loud you can't just toss a bunch of poorly written and formatted things from your "when I grow up wish journal" and have people give you money.

It does appear to be the same fellow, which at this point has nicely reset my "Confidence-o-meter" in the con-artist to a solid and steady 0.

Sad? Or hilarious? I can't decide.

[Evan]

I don't think it is him because this is what he posted on Facebook for their contest, "I guess if I post this link and get two friends to like them, I get a free deck of killer playing cards. Help me get a free pack before anyone else. Please anyone?

http://m.facebook.com/pages/The-Con-ArtistCom/330147213678457?id=330147213678457&_rdr "


Doesn't sound like he works for them. And on their Facebook page, he participated in their other contests.

[Kanped]

Err... to me that sounds exactly like he is running the show.  'killer playing cards'?  He's trying to drum up hype and start a like-for-like thing to bring in more people, I reckon.

We have had an overwhelming 398 emails, we will get back to you as soon as possible. Make sure you post the phrase in our previous post to your wall and get 2 friends to like this page and check your privacy settings and allow us to view your wall to verify. YES the first 150 to do this correct and let us know will get the SWEETEST cards you have ever seen when we launch!

Dear god, why doesn't everyone else think this sounds shady as hell?!

EDIT:

Went ahead and posted this picture on his FB wall.  Just thought people may be curious.

[Linguist_]

Dear god, why doesn't everyone else think this sounds shady as hell?!

The whole thing is shady as hell. I don't mean to sound like an old fart, but it really seems like these marketing ploys are geared towards young teenagers. I don't see how anyone with even minimal life experience can get excited over empty words that emphatically talk about a deck of cards that for all intents and purposes does not even exist.

I've noticed that the same demographic is much more readily inclined to jump on the freebie competitions bandwagon. While I understand everyone likes something for free, it's starting to become expected. Skulkor giving away $500 worth of products, and now this company giving away free decks for a few likes.

Not to mention the fact they're called The-Con-Artist.

Well, speculation is speculation. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what becomes of this brand.

Went ahead and posted this picture on his FB wall.  Just thought people may be curious.

Hey, he talks to himself too!

[Kanped]

I'm convinced this is a balls-out con job.  I dunno how he thinks he's getting paid at the end of it.  His last few Kickstarter campaigns have failed miserably; maybe he saw the success people were having with playing cards on there and decided to take a punt at that and then disappear with the money or something?
He must have a method to screw over Amazon payments or the bank somehow so they can't track him.  Hmm... wonder if he has an Amazon account I can find, then?

Here's more;

Just in case anybody was still in doubt, this is taken from an (utterly failing and almost certainly bogus) Kickstarter project to make a video game.  There's no mention of anyone with any coding experience or other useful skills being involved.  Note the location; it's the same as the registrar for the con-artist website.  He's apparently also tried making a clothing line and television.  This guy's a joke.

[JimmyJohns]

Wow Kanped, you are really good at digging the web, 10++++ for that.

When I first saw this I was thinking that is another cheesy marketing stunt, but looks like it can be more...not in the good way.

Thanks for the info.