Hi Guys,

Well, I have a big problem.

Last year I won a free IPB license in a competition. Great! However this person who gave it away in the competition said he wanted it back, and was willing to trade an owned vbulletin license for it. So I thought ok, good idea. Since he was the person who gave it to me, I went ahead and gave him access to the CP and he said vBulletin would contact me in a few days to confirm the transfer.

Almost a month on, and I've not heard anything, he's not replying to emails so he has obviously done a runner. Here's the weird part. Because the Client login password was saved in my password saver, I am still logged in to the client area EVEN though he's changed the pass and email (Must be a bug in their system). I know he's active because he renewed the license a few days ago. I tried changing the password and email BUT because he's changed the password I can't.

I've email IPB support and they've not replied, (2 weeks ago) so they obviously don't care this has happened. I'm under 18 so I can't take legal actions, and he lives in American and I'm in New Zealand so I can't call him. What else can I do to get his attention?

I thought about spamming the board he has the license on but that's offline at the moment.

I need to do something, because I'm without a license for my forum now.

Please help me
Thank You,
LTC

I don't know why they do that...

Anyway I don't know what you can do. Hipefully you think of something. Just goes to show there are a lot of dishonest people so be careful.

If you have no reaction from IPS, I suggest you to buy a IPB license.

Why should I have to buy another one when I've legally already got one ? They have stolen it from me. It is a case of theft.

What you wrote, it sounds to me you gave it up to him. Now maybe if you can prove you are the owner of the account by validating address, and possibly last 4 digits on the credit card. But, to me it sounds like you are screwed.

Well I'm not going to sit back and do nothing. I'm going to get that license back.

Good luck. Sounds like Mission Impossible to me. As far as I know you can't actually transfer licences any more anyway.

I would suggest asking your members for some donations to cover the cost of the board and support. I doubt IPS would be terribly interested in getting involved with this so better to start clean with your own legit version from IPS.

3DKiwi
(Another Kiwi)

My members are teenagers (It's a teen forum) who don't have access to paypal.

Yeah, licenses cannot be transferred between accounts. You need to actually *buy* the account that has the license on it. I did this, and they were very helpful in merging the two accounts together, and moving the license to the forum that I wanted it on.

It is a risk to give out the account information, and we just saw what happens if a dishonest person gains control of it.

You can always call IPS about the problem, usually calling and actually talking to someone is easier. Unfortunately, you may not be getting the license back

Unfortunately, we are completely hands-off with anything related to a license transfer. We used to do our best to assist, but we quickly found people selling the same license to 10+ different people, selling it then doing a chargeback on the original transaction, etc. We now simply don't approve of license transfers and anything you do is at your very own risk. In this particular case, this person is likely the original owner of the license anyway as we do not recognize third party transactions related to licenses, so ultimately the license would be given back to the original owner anyway.

I'm afraid this may be a lesson learned and any recourse you have will need to be through legal channels. There's simply nothing we can do for you.

If you have further questions or concerns, please e-mail us at management [at] invisionpower [dot] com. I don't see a record of previous correspondence from you, so it's likely your e-mail never made it into the system.

Thank you.