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This thread was created to warn people about the website, Miniature Wargame Conversions... it has evolved due to the fact that Matthew Bonder emailed me saying those I had been communicating with had "quit" the website because of our correspondence.

Hence, we've been discussing Matthew Bonder (in the context of his using the site to give himself an alias and credibility, while still continuing to take commissions) from that point forward...

It would be a large effort to get that evidence together, and in the end, wouldn't be something "we" would be doing. It would take a single person who was scammed by him and wanted to file charges and/or sue... and that's a pretty big task.

My goal in making the thread was just to make people aware- I might be able to help gather evidence, but I think people are really underestimating the amount of effort it would take to really bring Matthew to justice.

As I posted before, I think the easiest route would be someone who was scammed and is in-state with him (Texas) although MagickalMemories has let me know that he didn't think the state lines were such an issue. What I read seemed to indicate that doing any kind of small claim across state lines was really hard... and for any kind of criminal charge, I think it would be another challenge entirely.

It's fine to talk about doing so (and perhaps something will come of it), but again, I think the effort involved would be really high... I don't personally think I could do it, and just want to focus on making as many people aware of him as possible so that they can avoid being scammed.

RiTides wrote:

CorvidMP wrote:If your were to notify them it would be helpful to have all the evidence proving a crime took place was organized and documented. It would also have to be an actual victim contacting them for them to take it seriously (alpharious would suffice I think, but more is always better here).

CorvidMP wrote:Postal police might be a good way to go though, especially if you can get several victims together to report it.

I definitely think it would be worthwhile to get together a group of evidence... I was wondering about this, but wasn't sure how it could be shown to be legitimate? Wouldn't any statements by people need to be notarized and sent by mail, rather than email, to be worth anything?

On a related note, I had a situation on bartertown where I paid someone for miniatures, and he didn't produce. He stopped corresponding completely. After a period of time, and several warnings, I looked up online the local Police Department, and emailed them (It was years ago, so I forget if that officer was handling fraud cases, or he was just a detective). I explained my situation, the mail fraud, the amount involved, and gave him the name, address, contact information, and links to online info (and emails etc). The local PD gave me a number to call, and I called, talked to an officer who took all the info, etc., and he said he'd get back to me.

I simultaneously filed mail fraud charges through the USPS website (I believe you can do it online). I informed the guy that all the above had been done.

Needless to say, the guy got back in touch, and sent the stuff I was owed. Now my situation was way less than Alpharius', but its also my understanding that as the amount involved in mail fraud goes up, so does the seriousness of the charge. I'd start by simply calling the local PD, and seeing what can be done. Likewise with checking out USPS (if you sent him anything through the mail, and DCs, etc would be helpful).

It wasnt a ton of work on my end to call and talk to the police, and click around the USPS site, to get it started. To get others organized as well, that would take a bit more work but I've seen it done many times on other trade sites.

Hope this isnt OT.

That's really helpful Cruentus, not OT at all... thanks.

^^ I can't tell if that was fecious or not.^^

MightyGodzilla wrote:^^ I can't tell if that was fecious or not.^^

Not facetious. It's actually very helpful information. Context in typed speech is difficult.

Right, I was being sincere... and I do think it's possible to take that route, however it is purely a "first party" avenue... someone not directly involved is not going to be able to file charges with local police or report mail fraud.

I'd like to thank you RiTides as well. I wasn't aware of the M. Bonder problem but followed "his" website/blog relatively closely for some weeks.
Seen the topic here, read all and now avoiding this website like hell

Well, It's really a shame you are avoiding MWC cause we have a ton of great hobby content articles in the works from all of our writers including some really awesome airbrush tutorials and product spotlights from several vendors you may not be aware of.

We even have a really cool conversion contest coming up with 1st, 2nd and 3 place prizes including gift certificates to reputable online hobby stores and cool swag from various online merchants. As always our contest are free to enter and there are no stings attached.

It's a shame you guys will be missing out on all the fun. It's going to be awesome!

Ah, thats fun I think I can afford to miss thanks. Would rather cut my hand off with rusty shears than do anything that would profit Redstarone.

LuckyNo.5 wrote:Well, It's really a shame you are avoiding MWC cause we have a ton of great hobby content articles in the works from all of our writers including some really awesome airbrush tutorials and product spotlights from several vendors you may not be aware of.

We even have a really cool conversion contest coming up with 1st, 2nd and 3 place prizes including gift certificates to reputable online hobby stores and cool swag from various online merchants. As always our contest are free to enter and there are no stings attached.

It's a shame you guys will be missing out on all the fun. It's going to be awesome!

It's a shame Matt Bonder won't just settle up with all the folks he still owes to, and comes clean. It's a shame you guys are giving out prizes to folks when there's debt outstanding.

I'd hate to miss out on that event when Matt comes clean, that would be awesome.

You gotta admire the tenacity at least.

It's like a guy who robbed you sending a personal invitation to his raffle. 8|

@Morathi, Well there's no profit here other than to the MWC blog followers that submit entries and to any online store that sponsors the contest. Considering Redstar doesn't own any online store that leaves him out of the profit equation.

@Whitedragon, The prizes we are giving out are from all of the MWC writers and the stores that we get sponsorship from. Not from Matt personally. Hell, I'm forking money out of my own pocket to make the prize package sweeter.

We just want to see some action online and have a contest to excite the blog-o-sphere community a bit. There hasn't been a good contest with good prizes online in a while and I think it's about time. I think it's an awesome event for everyone to get excited about in these bleak mid-winter doldrum months.

I know I'm totally barking up the wrong, stubborn tree here, but you aren't getting the point, Lucky.

The point is that no matter how much goodwill building you attempt to do, the elephant in the room is your open relationship with a known con man. No amount of contests and "hey guys! Check all our other awesome stuff out!" is going to repair that.

You can have the nicest cruise ship in the world, but nobody's gonna want to get on it if your captain is the same guy who drove it into rocks, you know?

curran12 wrote:I know I'm totally barking up the wrong, stubborn tree here, but you aren't getting the point, Lucky.

The point is that no matter how much goodwill building you attempt to do, the elephant in the room is your open relationship with a known con man. No amount of contests and "hey guys! Check all our other awesome stuff out!" is going to repair that.

You can have the nicest cruise ship in the world, but nobody's gonna want to get on it if your captain is the same guy who drove it into rocks, you know?

I think it's you not getting the point. I'm not trying to repair anything. I and the other writers are trying to enrich and enliven the blog-o-sphere without being bogged down by the naysayers,

We have about 1376 followers allowed to enter, if even 5 percent of them enter that's about 70 contestants. About 70 people that have a chance to participate in something awesome.

If you don't want to go on a cruise, don't buy a ticket, that simple.

LuckyNo.5 wrote:

I think it's you not getting the point. I'm not trying to repair anything.I and the other writers are trying to enrich and enliven the blog-o-sphere without being bogged down by the naysayers.

You may be in the wrong spot for that. When there's a fraud investigation ongoing into a bank, and people are talking about it in the letters of a newspaper, you don't usually write in saying, 'Hey! Check out the awesome new mortgage rates!'.

If you want to go for positive publicity, doing so in a place attempting to warn people from being burnt by a scammer may be a bad idea.

Still- I'm glad you're posting here again, Lucky No. 5. But you must be able to see that offering prizes from a site connected to someone with outstanding debts is going to seem wrong/unfair to people?

I know some people might jump at the chance of free stuff- but I'd rather you and the staff send those items to the people Matt Bonder has outstanding debts to, rather than raffle them off. It's kind of a slap in the face to those he's robbed... it ignores the continuing wrong, and attempts to put a good face on a site connected to the man who did those wrongs.

That would put him in a position to continue his actions, as it seems he is still doing, given that a few people who have current unfilled commissions with him (started last year) have posted in this thread.

LuckyNo.5 wrote:
I think it's you not getting the point. I'm not trying to repair anything. I and the other writers are trying to enrich and enliven the blog-o-sphere without being bogged down by the naysayers.

"The naysayers"... the site is being run by a crook who owes people money. If he can put money into prizes how about settling his actual debts?

WMC could be a reputable site if the connection with Matt was severed. The work done there looks good, but you know, it's owned by a man you'd be a fool to trust and who is using it and people like you to build a good name. I mean he didn't even want to admit he was running the site at first and cooked up a couple of aliases. God only knows what he'll do once he's sucked enough people into his confidence.

Assuming you are genuine, you don't know this man beyond a few prizes you've won. Ever heard of the phrase to use a sprat to catch a mackerel? It'll end in tears when he does a runner yet again with people's money leaving you with people sending you emails demanding their money or some sort of response.

How is offering prizes to contestants that won fair and square wrong in anyway? To be clear it's not a raffle, it's a contest of skill. Open to followers of the blog and the winners voted upon by the general public.

Why would we the staff send prizes to people that we don't even know or have had any communication with EVER?
How could we ever trust them. Every shady gamer kid would come out of the wood work and say we owe them something.

Why do you refuse to see that MWC is multiple people and just not one man? We have 11 writers and more on the way. Let's put this into perspective here… What if a member of Dakka was going around to every LFGS in the community and started arguments in the middle of each game and everyone in the store hated him. Then the other people online were like "Don't ever go to Dakka, they only start arguments during games" It's not the whole site, it's 1 person. I wish I could explain that more clearly so you understand.

Once again, to reiterate. We don't offer any services of any kind. No money is exchanged, no products offered. The only thing we do is hobby articles and the occasional contest.
If that is beyond your abilities to comprehend, well then I just don't know what to say.

Did you miss the posts in this thread about the sale of miniatures (Knight Titans) from MWC? Go back and check. The blog post has since been removed but it existed.

People do say that about Dakka.

However what you're refusing to see is that MWC has, at its heart, a person well-known for shady practices. You're not going to escape that stigma. The sooner you realize that cutting ties with Bonder and forming your own group and vetting the contributors is the only way to save face from this debacle, the better.

.

Lt. Coldfire wrote:.

Um that link is from last year.... it's 2012 Bro.
And yes that was the pay it forward raffle, another legit contest we threw for a while until we changed it to the Conversion contest featured here:
http://miniaturewargameconversions.blogspot.com/search/label/contest

Click it if your brave enough...

note, I see you quickly edited that link out....


Also, Mr. Treesong. If you took 2 seconds to google me you'd find my blog as well as my personal site and my profile on several non-dakka forums.

http://eyeoferror.blogspot.com/

I've a real person despite your conspiracy theories.

Yeah, noticed. It was the only thing I found on google, then saw it was the wrong date after posting of course. I have no chance in a contest like that, but as a former target of Matt's, I wouldn't anyways.

Lt. Coldfire wrote:Yeah, noticed. It was the only thing I found on google, then saw it was the wrong date after posting of course. I have no chance in a contest like that, but as a former target of Matt's, I wouldn't anyways.

The contest is public vote. There is no animosity, malice or bias in the voting/judging
The only time judges would step in is to resolve a tie breaker, in which case it would be a group vote.

Doesn't matter - entering the contest provides publicity and validation. People who have been scammed by someone profiting from said publicity and validation have very real acceptable reasons not to enter.

'I've stolen thousands of dollars worth of stuff and money. But I'm giving away hundreds of dollars of free stuff, so everyone can clearly trust me again and not worry at all that I might be trying to build my reputation back up and steal a few thousand more dollars!'

It's great that Matt's trying to give back to the community, but a much better first step would be to give back the money and models he has stolen. He can give away this stuff - why can't he return/send what he was paid for? The only answer I can currently see is because he's trying to convince new people into bad deals with him. And frankly, he's using the MWC bloggers to help him. That you don't seem to care is really kinda disturbing.

And frankly, I wouldn't enter a competition by the man because I have no interest in the proceeds of criminal activities.

Jon Garrett wrote:'That you don't seem to care is really kinda disturbing.

That's what bothers me about this... and even moreso, that when Matt was emailing me pretending to be 2 contributors to the site that turned out not to exist, he said the same kind of things. "We don't know what Matt was into, but we're helping out just this once"

It'd be really easy to find out the people who Matt ripped off, and to make amends... Without doing that, running contests and giving away prizes is a hollow gesture, at best, and at worse giving credibility to Matt for when he makes his next scam (or continues his scams, as this thread has shown he is doing by the people who posted about current commissions he hasn't fulfilled).

Matt started and owns the site... instead of posting on it under his own name, he posts on it as "Miniature Wargame Conversions" . That is extremely Not transparent about his involvement, and with good reason...

Your analogy would be much more on-point if yakface were to go around robbing people at FLGS. If that happened, I most certainly would terminate my connection to DakkaDakka, or try to get him to give someone else control of it so that it could carry on without him.

Until the website comes clean in one of those two ways, it will not be able to move forward as far as most hobbyists are concerned...

I also don't see how it doesn't bother you that, past scams of Matt's aside, he was pretending to be contributors that don't exist in order to buy time fulfilling a past-due commission (in his communications with me). I have proof of this with voicemails. As a legitimate contributor, how can this not affect you?

You also speak for the website as if you've been connected for some time, but you just joined... I find this odd and don't really understand why you'd be doing so (I mean that genuinely- not casting doubt on your identity, just wondering what your motivation could possibly be, when you could have held the same contest on your own blog...). Is it just for followers? A number of the people following are doing so, I'm sure, to keep an eye on Matt's activities. For every "genuine" follower, you're going to have a lot of people who either check to see what Matt's doing, or avoid the site altogether when they would otherwise have been interested. Why would you possibly want to be involved?

LuckyNo.5 wrote:How is offering prizes to contestants that won fair and square wrong in anyway? To be clear it's not a raffle, it's a contest of skill. Open to followers of the blog and the winners voted upon by the general public.

Why would we the staff send prizes to people that we don't even know or have had any communication with EVER?
How could we ever trust them. Every shady gamer kid would come out of the wood work and say we owe them something.

Why do you refuse to see that MWC is multiple people and just not one man? We have 11 writers and more on the way. Let's put this into perspective here… What if a member of Dakka was going around to every LFGS in the community and started arguments in the middle of each game and everyone in the store hated him. Then the other people online were like "Don't ever go to Dakka, they only start arguments during games" It's not the whole site, it's 1 person. I wish I could explain that more clearly so you understand.

People do bash the whole site, every groups gets that and it's usually nonsense. But the difference is that unlike WMC, Dakka is not owned by a person that has stolen off people.

It doesn't matter if WMC is currently giving stuff away. Everything you've said does not address the main issue that WMC is owned by a person who has left many people out of money/models totalling thousands of pounds. The fact that he can currently give stuff away from the goodness of his heart while leaving people out of pocket... doesn't that seem a bit odd to you?

I have only doubted your authenticity because I'm surprised someone could be so blinkered as to get involved with such a shady person and give him and his site greater credibility. All I can imagine is that you enjoy the extra hits on your blog or something.

Tell me, would you recommend commissioning Matt for conversion and modelling work if the opportunity arose?

RiTides wrote:It'd be really easy to find out the people who Matt ripped off, and to make amends... Without doing that, running contests and giving away prizes is a hollow gesture, at best, and at worse giving credibility to Matt for when he makes his next scam

Man you are a dense fella. MWC IS NOT JUST MATT. last time I'm saying it. Aside from that all I'm see is one persons word against another and a lot of online rabbal rousing.

RiTides wrote:Matt started and owns the site... instead of posting on it under his own name, he posts on it as "Miniature Wargame Conversions" . That is extremely Not transparent about his involvement, and with good reason...

Um so is the owner of Dakka Dakka actually named Dakka Dakka? Is Rtides your real name?
Here, this might be of help. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonym#Computer_users

RiTides wrote:Until the website comes clean in one of those two ways, it will not be able to move forward as far as most hobbyists are concerned...

Well..we'll see about that won't we

RiTides wrote:You also speak for the website as if you've been connected for some time, but you just joined...

Need I remind you again that I have been friends with Matt and most of the writers online for quite some time before I joined. And when I do commit to something I don't do it half-assed.

RiTides wrote:A number of the people following are doing so, I'm sure, to keep an eye on Matt's activities. For every "genuine" follower, you're going to have a lot of people who either check to see what Matt's doing, or avoid the site altogether when they would otherwise have been interested. Why would you possibly want to be involved?

Well that's a HUGE assumption with absolutely no validation. Unless you know all 1376 followers personally I'd be wary to take any stock in your opinion.

Side note, In all my internet travels and discussions across the net, this is the only venue where I have heard anything ill of MWC. In fact through all my various acquaintances I've received nothing but adulation at learning the news that I've joined. But I guess that means that everyone I talk to online is a "delinquent hobbits" by Dakka standards. Too Bad So Sad for me then


And on that note…


pics on Sodahead

RiTides a hater? Clearly you are not one with the force. It's hard to be less of a hater.
Of course he has issues with Matt and MWC--he was SCAMMED. If warning the community about scammers is hateful, then count me in--I'll be hater.

He knows MWC is not just Matt, but it's run by Matt. Most people who know of Matt aren't going to support it out of principle.