I recently purchased a copy of Cradle of Filth's Orgiastic Pleasures Foul from a seller on eBay that doesn't offer returns but has a 100% feedback rating. I was hesitant to buy it and kept communicating with the seller throughout the entire auction. Well, I won the auction. I was partly excited and partly nervous because I won the auction at $46.01, and since the item was shipping from Greece that added an extra $12 for a grand total of $58.01 for a single cassette (actually two cassettes. The seller included a bonus tribute to Immortal cassette with my purchase) so you can understand my concern I'm sure.

Okay, so getting to the point. Upon initial inspection it looked legit. The jewel case looked right the cassette looked good. This does appear to be a 22 year old cassette, the insert even has the proper amount of wear. (Not that any of this is relevant as to whether or not it's a bootleg, but at least I can be pretty sure it's from the right time period.) My first concern came upon listening to the tape. I was somewhat sleepy while listening to it and was kind of only half awake during certain parts (this is a very repetitive recording and can be sleep inducing if you're tired) and I kind of lost track of a sense of how long I had been listening. ANYWAY, side one comes to an end and so a take the cassette out flip it over and get ready to listen to side two. There's only one problem...THERE IS NO SIDE TWO! I listen and listen but nothing but hissing. So I'm like " what a rip off! They forgot to record the second side of the demo while they were bootlegging it!" But then I thought to myself how long was I dosing off for? So I looked at the insert again and saw that the run length was approximately 28 minutes. How long had I been listening for? I couldn't remember, so I took it back out, flipped it over, hit rewind and took another listen. This time paying extra careful attention to the clock. Well once again "side one" came to a close, and how long was it running? APPROXIMATELY 28 MINUTES! Then it dawned on me...this is a single sided cassette . But then why, does the insert have the songs divided into two parts: Side 1 and Side 2?

Now I'm aware that COF starting releaseing this demo on different cassette tapes after it's initial pressing, but I wasn't aware of any single sided versions. Plus on the insert I have where it says recorded in 3 days in blah blah blah, that part is cut off a bit. I'll show you what I mean in the pictures.

If you've made it through my long, drawn out, very dull story, I congratulate you. Now please help me figure out if this is a legit COF OPF demo or a very clever bootleg.

Here are the pictures.

http://imgur.com/LOPouMT

http://imgur.com/6i1jVz0

http://imgur.com/Vg1o0xY

http://imgur.com/FeJE1qT

http://imgur.com/CFDvE0b

http://imgur.com/XrarHtZ

http://imgur.com/fdzp6RV

http://imgur.com/jYTIcnw

http://imgur.com/99tcWdv

http://imgur.com/KlaScdv


See what I mean how it's cut off a little?

How the fuck do you post images on this site?

Upload them onto http://www.imgur.com and paste the URLs directly into your post.

Here is your problem

Why's that?

Greek eBayers are pretty notorious for bootlegging demos constantly.

Fuck me! Well I'd still like to upload the images for you guys to look at. Once I figure out how.

Okay. Got the images. Check my first post and click the provided links to view.

There's no way that's not a bootleg. I'll let this thread opened for some time but it will be closed soon.

Use this thread in the future: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=92986

Okay gotcha.

Why are you so sure it's a bootleg?

That's a more modern Supertape. They definitely wouldn't have copied their demo onto those cassettes. That'd be the big disqualification in my book. They may have mistakenly put all the songs on side 1, but I haven't seen that before with this demo and they were supposed to be split between sides 1 and 2, as shown on the Archives.

I tend to stay away from Greek sellers, even when buying new albums. Bootlegging is big problem there and it's too much of a risk. Generally, if the cheapest (or the only) copy you can find of something is being sold out of Greece, that's a good indication to me that you're not getting an authentic item.

^
Or Eastern countries like Russia, Belarus, etc.

I hope you paid with Paypal OP, otherwise you're kind of fucked!

I did pay with Paypal. Why? What does that mean?

It means you can file a complaint against the seller and get your money back. But this is pretty basic stuff, just read the FAQs for Ebay/Paypal.

Claim a refund because you didn't get what you were paying for.

"Wear and tear" is incredibly easy to falsify. Prop makers in films do it all the time to make things appear aged and used.