Yes, we bought our own items

Hello! Here Mario Hernandez, from Barcelona,

Recently a friend of mine and me created a project called “Barcelona Music Studio”, in order to work in AudioJungle and start a way of living.

We have been working hard and have created 4 tracks in three months and aimed to work the whole year, every day, full-time.

Unfortunately, we recently had the bad idea of buying one of our items by creating fake accounts and buying 19 times one of our songs in order to reach the minimum to be in the “weekly top sellers” and have a great exposition.

We discourage people to do this. Although we lived this as an “auto promotion investment”, now that we have been spotted, we have thought about this and we are not happy with what has happened.

For your information, our account is now locked out for three months and we cannot create any audiojungle account in all this time.

I do write these lines in my name and in the name of my partner to apologize for this unfair practice.

We will not do it again and when our account will be activated again, we will delete and reupload the item that we bought and rated unfairly.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

We insist: we will not do this again.

We respect you.

Our most sincere apologies.

Kind regards,

Mario

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@mariohernandez That could not have been easy to write and share with the rest of the Envato community but I think it’s an incredibly good point to share and I applaud your honesty sharing it, great post and thank you so much for sharing your experience and sound advice. :thumbsup:

Sometimes items (and accounts) are removed entirely from Envato Market and this is one of the reasons - trying to game the system by self-purchasing. Envato have previously gone on record stating that self-purchasing is not permitted so authors really have to be careful about complying with terms and playing fairly. There are some robust systems in place (including a dedicated Fraud department) that monitor suspicious activity of all kinds and if someone thinks that they’ve got away with something unscrupulous, don’t be naive to think that it hasn’t already been flagged on your account or the activity is not recorded or closely monitored.

I only add this to echo what Mario has kindly shared because I’ve unfortunately seen this happen far too frequently and it’s never nice when it happens: Authors and/or items go missing, buyers are confused why their purchases are no longer available, users who bookmarked items can no longer find or purchase them, and the guilty author ultimately loses out in a huge way because future earnings are lost. Possibly an entire income stream. That’s just scary and a heavy price to pay for not playing fair, but it’s a reality of trying to fraudulently game any kind of system. Envato cannot reveal why items or authors have been removed because of privacy, so it’s always a sad, lose-lose situation all around, for the entire community.

Bottom line, as Mario very eloquently stated, just don’t do it. And if you suspect someone is doing it, open a Help Ticket without calling anyone out publicly in the forums.

Thanks again, Mario, your message and advice is not a happy story to read, but nonetheless, it’s a very important point for all authors on Envato Market to keep in mind.

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Brave of you to share this story with all of us. Mistakes are only there to learn from!

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hi it takes guts to either recognize a mistake and most importantly to face responsibilities , what u do (unlike a lot of people) and for this i assume that people should not bear a grudge on you … i will personally be happy to welcome u back when u finish being suspended, just hope that u’ll learn from this story and think about the fact that all guys need to live as much as they can from their art , not only u … and that all deserve fair “competition”. good luck buddies :wink:

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+1 @scottwills. Is good to know that Envato and some ninja authors are able to spot this practice.

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+1@scottwills. Nice to know. And honoust in the rebound with guts!

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What a brave man! I don’t know how I missed this great thread.
I would like to congratulate you for your honest soul and your bravery. :smiley:
Cheers!
“The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.”

  • Saint Augustine
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Welcome back mario and team! A good lesson for all to learn from the experience you just shared, not easy at all. Thanks for sharing :+1:
Stay strong :muscle:

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What is his bravery?
If he told this before blocked account then yes he can be a brave!
But after this bad step only remorse…

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I don’t want to get this thread off-topic by discussing what the bravery is, just move on :smiley:

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Bought my item too, only once though and not because of ranking but because of the purchasecode I get to test my support system around the Envato API since there’s no way to get a test code or a sandbox mode. Whatever.

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boldly and honestly

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You are true, @Cryonics! If we had not been blocked, we would not have written this post. Because by being spotted and our account being locked out, we had the opportunity to stop and think about this practice.

As we wrote before, at the beginning we faced this practice as an obscure “auto promotion investment”. I say obscure because we had to hide it: we knew it was not allowed. Indeed, after having bought our own items we felt something was not going well.

And finally, after having rated 5 stars our own items, we felt that something was going certainly wrong. The strategic practice of “auto promotion investment” started to smell bad. You say remorse. It is true! We felt really bad.

And by feeling bad we knew that we had not won the game. We forgot something.

We forgot the rest of authors!! (as you note, @n2n44)

It wasn’t until the action of Envato staff that we totally realized of the real and unfair effects of this practice on the author community. That’s why we wrote that letter. That’s why we have written: we respect you.

And that’s why we will not repeat this again.

Thank you all for your responses, friends! We wish you all the best on your way!

(hopefully) See you in three months

Thank you too, @ scottwills, for your respectful and kind post.

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Thanks for revelation words :innocent:

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You are a MAN.
God bless you!

That’s an ethical move of you to accept full responsibility for these actions. Well done!