The Alex Ruskman Scam Problem

First of all, Alex Ruskman is a pseudonym. No idea who's behind this name because there's no trace of a real person with that name on the internet. Alex sells presets, power grades, and LUTs on Gumroad, and all of his products are just rebranded versions of work created by others. Among other things, he also sells the Classic Film Presets 2021 under a new name, and users are surprised when Lightroom notifies them during installation that the product already exists. Alex didn’t even put in the bare minimum effort to avoid being caught immediately.

I tried reaching out to Gumroad and going through their process for handling such cases, but I never received a response. There's not much I can do about it, but that's not the whole Alex Ruskman problem.

Every now and then, customers write to me, saying they’ve been deceived and asking if I can compensate them for their loss. I explain that I had no influence over whether or to what extent they were misled, and that it’s their own responsibility to check whether a seller might have fraudulent intentions. If you can't find any information about a person, if they seem not to exist despite supposedly having created and selling a large number of digital goods, that's highly suspicious. I don’t even run serious marketing efforts, yet it’s still easy to verify that I exist, that I have real expertise, and that I’ve been actively working in this field for years.

What I’m getting at is that the Alex Ruskman problem is also a problem of taking responsibility. Right now, I have yet another email from someone who insists on getting some sort of compensation. They want me to take responsibility for Alex Ruskman’s scam and for their own failure to check whether it might be a scam. Every few months, someone seriously demands that I make up for someone else’s misconduct.

The absolute minimum expected of you as an adult is to take responsibility for your actions. Shit happens—you have to accept it, move on, and learn from it. If someone does that, I want to support them, I want to help them. But someone who just wastes time with emails that can be summed up as ME, ME, ME—no one wants to help that person.