Horror Con Con Warning

Most genre fiction fans are decent types, but there always a few bad apples, and so on and so forth. Anyway, I followed links to a site I'd never heard of thanks to an FB posting (See? Facebook can be useful.) Anyway, the skinny is that some git in American has taken people's money for a supposed horror convention that has failed to come off on numerous occasions. This has dodgy written all over it in letters of fire:

In 2008/2009 the show was announced, it was to be called Camp Blood:Friday the 30th- a Convention featuring nothing but celebrities who were involved in the making of the Friday the 13th films. It was to be the biggest and best Friday the 13th Con ever assembled, featuring over 70 guests. Soon after the announcement it was rumored that a lot of the guests posted on the website (http://fridaythe30th.com/) had not been contacted at the time of the site’s inception. The Friday the 30th Con was to replace Texas Fear Fest 3 and promised that the guests were confirmed for all 12 films in the series, including the remake and the tv series. 

Fans were abuzz about the large guest list and from the beginning they had questions which were sometimes answered by Gray and his people. But even from the start there were suspicions of the event being a farce. Venue changes- from a hotel to a sports bar, off the wall reasons for date changes and celebrity cancellations have plagued this show. Many fans purchased advanced tickets, including the popular “VIP Passes” that cost as much as $200! Because of the cancellation of the most recent date, August 13-15, 2010, a slew of fans lost non-refundable airfare and fees they had paid to secure hotel rooms. Not to mention they have at this date, January 9, 2011, not been refunded for the tickets they bought for the show itself. Fans who believe the show will go on, have tried to purchase tickets but with no luck as the Convention’s Paypal account is not able to accept money. I contacted customer service at Paypal to ask why an account might not be able to accept money. They informed me, without being able to go into details because I didn’t ask about any account in particular, that most times when an account cannot accept funds it is because of open disputes on the account.