There are plenty of scams going on in the porn world, and in trying to stop one to which adult producer DVSX has fallen prey, the company unwittingly found itself the victim of another one.
For those who don’t know the ins and outs of porn sales, understand that it’s not uncommon for an American producer to cut European buyers a bit of a price break. After all, The Euros have to pay to ship the stuff over there, and with import duties and taxes, European distributors have to put quite a mark-up on the disks just to break even.
But what if an American distributor or store chain could figure out a way to get those European wholesale prices for disks he (or she) sells right here in America?
Enter the scammer.
“Some of these [European] guys have either close relationships or deals with some people in the [U.S. adult] industry, where the foreign buyer will place an order for our entire line, and we will ship the product out to them, with us not knowing that they’re going to send it back,” explained Javier C. of DVSX. “What happens is, when it gets there, he won’t pay import duties, taxes, nothing like that, but reroute it back to the U.S. – in fact, we think it may never even leave the U.S. – so [the cost] is still a little bit less than what they pay for it here in the U.S., which allows them to have a greater profit margin. And it creates a problem for us here because it undercuts our own pricing.”
So DVSX figured out what seemed like a simple way to avoid the situation: Just put a sticker on each DVD package intended for the European market that says, “Not For Sale Within The U.S.” Problem solved, right?
But DVSX never counted on Internet chat sites.
“This all started on the Internet,” recounted DVSX’s Sun Chen, “on this forum that a number of industry people happen to frequent, and it came up because [of] someone who said he had seen on this European Website that they were selling our DVDs, and the DVDs had this sticker on them, so he was saying, well, there must be a European version of DVSX titles, which there isn’t. There is no difference between the product we sell to the foreign market and the product that we sell to the customers in the United States; it’s just that we’re trying to prevent possible bootlegging and things of that nature that seem to be a huge problem these days.”
Sure enough, all one has to do is go to EroDVD, a Netherlands site that sells many American companies’ DVDs. Just click on their “DVSX” button, and the message pops up, “WARNING!! European Edition!!! These dvd`s do content [sic] scenes that are forbidden in the States.”
Adult Internet chat being what it is, as soon as the concept that DVSX was manufacturing harder European versions of their features appeared on the chat boards, it set off a firestorm of discussion, especially with the original poster claiming to have contacted a principal at EroDVD, who said that, yes, the DVSX features they were selling did indeed contain content that would be troublesome if it appeared in the American version.
“She must never have looked at the DVDs we sent her,” comments Javier.
In any case, visions of pissing and fisting in DVSX features danced in fans’ heads, and the topic quickly garnered more than a dozen posts – and it didn’t help that it took Sun Chen six days to decide that the issue was worth a comment from the company itself. That delay spurred questions of, “Why did you take so long to respond? What have you got to hide?”
Evil Angel’s Tricia Devereaux chimed in with the fact that her company uses similar stickers on the inside of its packaging, including an offer that if an American customer buys a DVD with such a sticker, there’s an 800 number to call and a reward for reporting a U.S. sale of a Euro-market disk. But Tricia’s comment spurred another round of posts, accusing DVSX of putting its sticker on the outside in order to fool customers into thinking they were getting something harder for their money, even though the sticker itself makes no such claim.
In the world of adult Internet chat, it seems you just can’t win.
“Someone wrote to the woman that runs the website and said, ‘What’s the deal with this? Why is the sticker on there? Why does it say, “Warning, these are not for sale in the United States”? Because that’s what it says on the Website,” Chen explained. “Apparently she got back to them and said, ‘The reason why those stickers are on there is because of the fact that there is harder content in there that’s only sold in Europe such as fisting or pissing.’ It was at that point, that I knew I had to reply, because we really didn't want people to get the wrong idea. I hadn’t replied to any of the posts up until that point, because I happened to be out of the office for a couple of days, and Javier had requested that I not reply until he was able to find out who was running this site and if they were a customer of ours or not. In any case, I finally replied and told them there is no such content like that because we don’t shoot that type of content anyway, and we don’t shoot any special extra footage for European versions than we do in the States. It’s my belief that the only reason why she keeps persisting and saying that there’s extra footage is because she wants to make sales off her site and detract away from people buying from us directly.”
Javier and Chen are hoping this tempest-in-a-chat-room will die down quickly now that they’ve made public statements about the lack of extra-hard content on their Euro-market DVDs – but Internet chat topics seem to have a life of their own, and DVSX may simply have to batten down its hatches and wait out the storm.
However, if an American consumer does find him- or herself in possession of a disk with a sticker that says, “Not For Sale Within The U.S.”, Javier would appreciate an e-mail notification to [email protected].
Hey, it’s the right thing to do!
