Peter S.

We purchased a set of tickets for Disney on Ice from this site. We received a "confirmation" (see the attached picture). We went to the actual event. They had no record of our tickets. We produced the "confirmation". That didn't help at all. So we called OnlineCityTickets. They verified that the ticket order had been placed and that a "confirmation" had been sent. They claimed that they had tried to get phone verification several times by Email. Who has ever heard of phone verification of an online order paid for with a credit card?

I checked all of my Email folders (including the spam folder) looking for the Emails. The supposed Emails were never sent/received. A few notes.

The "confirmation" is just fake. Look at it closely. Nowhere does OnlineCityTickets even mention that phone verification is needed before the tickets are purchased / issued However, the deeper problem is that need for phone verification. My guess is that OnlineCityTickets has severe fraud problems and the vendors / credit card companies have imposed a verification requirement as a consequence. Just a guess of course. However, doing business with this company is dangerous, to say the least.

Take a look at the recent reviews. Something has gone wrong with this company.

I tried to buy a copy of Microsoft Outlook 2010 from redboxsoftware.com. This turned out to be a mistake. It appears that redboxsoftware.com is a some type of fraud / hoax. To be sure, they did take my money. The first (strong) hint that something might be wrong, was the Email with the license code. The Email didn't come from redboxsoftware.com. It was from *******@softwaremart.ca. The Email had a license key (more on that later) and download instructions. The download instructions said I would download an ISO, that I could burn onto a CD/DVD, for installation. Not true. The download was actually an EXE from a (very slow and obscure) cloud site.

The download was 499 megabytes which seemed rather high. Suspecting malware, I scanned the EXE several times. No malware (apparently) was found. Running the EXE revealed that it was a self-extracting program. After extraction I had both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of 2010 Outlook. That probably explains the size of the EXE. My machine is 64-bit, but I have other 32-bit Office programs already installed (Word 2010). As a consequence, only the 32-bit version of 2010 Outlook would install. This worked rather smoothly.

The next issue was the license code. The initial license code failed (invalid according to Microsoft). I complained and got another license code (from *******@downloadmsoffice.com). This license code was invalid as well.

My guess is that redboxsoftware.com is fraudulent enterprise. The same conclusion applies to softwaremart.ca and downloadmsoffice. My guess (and it's just a guess) is that they are (trying) to use stolen VL (Volume Licensing) keys or (illegal) license code generators. Either way, they are not selling legitimate Microsoft software with legitimate Microsoft license keys.

Don't do business with these folks.