A word of caution - a scam site, possibly a phishing site

Some of you may have run into a website known as the "Wally files" aka Wallywashis.name.

The site claims to offer downloads of songs/albums for free and it requires users to register. It sounds like an Albumbase clone, except that there's no real music.

Disclaimer: I have no connection to this site, but I'm here to report on it since there appears to be little information elsewhere on the web.

http://wallywashis.name/oe/index.html

"Wally was his name and MP3 was his file"

Okay.

So I stumbled on this site while searching for rare releases online. After an inspection, I concluded that it could not be real. No sour grapes intended.

The website advertises a wide range of music genres, ranging from mainstream, to extremely obscure acts. While on the outside looks like a great source to get some hard to find releases (hell, I wonder how this guy even thought of putting obscure neofolk/martial/ethereal groups on there), it is really a scheme to reap advertising revenue, and possibly lift passwords off unsuspecting users.

Here's why it's not legit.

1. The account/password creation system does not have proper verification procedures
2. User access is not encrypted
3. There is no brute force protection
4. For a site that has a wide library, it lacks a search feature. Do users really have to resort to googling "site:wallywashis.name " ?
5. Doesn't use adsense or other services, only surveys that require unsuspecting individuals to compromise their address, mobile phone numbers, and install suspicious software. This is asking people to take a huge privacy and security risk, while causing some to experience billing charges for spam text messages from the surveys.
6. There are very few published comments on the site's blog. Notice how the navigator says that some posts have 60-170 comments. Many of them are moderated and not published. Somehow the guy running the show either forgot, or realized he was getting beat at his own game.

Further investigation yielded an IRC conversation on musicbrainz, which establishes further doubt of the site's true intent.

Available here: http://chatlogs.musicbrainz.org/musicbrainz/2009/2009-01/2009-01-06.html

"

looks almost as if someone has copied the mb db as fake mp3 open dir listing http://wallywashis.name/mp3/

and is using the data to get people to subscribe to some dubious site for "access"

the thing is, by manually entering band information, you can "find" even the most little-known bands :)

Cunning.

It's a bit odd to find "mp3s" for a demo tape I made 15 years ago over there

Considering I have the only copy of the tape and have never encoded it into mp3 in the first place :D

"
In summary - someone just copied musicbrainz's database of artists and albums and listed them as downloadable files. Even someone's old demo that was never encoded, let alone released.


Having a site like that is truly dishonest. Odds are the "library" it has is not real either - just spam files that have had their filesizes adjusted to simulate bitrate and track length. Some speculate that the files were merely indexed from popular sites such as last.fm and such.

Therefore, avoid it at any cost. And get the word out.