- IF YOU ATTENDED OTAKON, PLEASE READ -

Ah, it's good to be back home. Otakon was a lot of work, as you might imagine. It was especially difficult this year because Sarah stayed home to rest up while Jeff and Hawk and Ananth and Yuko and Mohammed and I took care of the MegaGear booth. Well... I did very little except run around in circles and worry about things (sorry for being so useless guys ^^;;;), but at least I was able to treat everyone to a decent meal at the Cheesecake Factory (they had chicken, so at least Hawk was happy :P) Thanks guys!

I don't have time for much of a write up right now, but i do need to post this: If you attended Otakon, you might remember seeing signs that warned to look out for con artists asking for money. This was part of Otakon's response to the actions of an person that was preying on innocent con goers and doing it partly in my name.

An individual who identified himself as "A.C. Riely" was representing himself as a Marine who was home from Iraq that was attending Otakon and needed help. This is bad enough, but he also claimed to work for the Megatokyo booth, and used this with a variety of stories to scam money off of innocent con goers and fans.

If you were approached by this person or gave this person money, PLEASE CONTACT ME IMMEDIATELY.

We were alerted to what was going on when people started coming to the booth looking for "A.C. Riely" and were upset when they found out that he did not work for us. We contacted Otakon Security and they worked hard to try to put a stop to this.

The good news is that the person identified and believed to be responsible was detained by Otakon security Saturday night and was arrested by the Baltimore Police on charges related to these activities. I am not giving out more details than this because i'm not sure what is ok for me to say at this point, since I am a victim of his actions (misrepresenting himself as a Megatokyo employee in order to victimize fans and readers is not something i will tolerate).

I'd like to Thank Otakon and their security staff for acting so promptly after we brought it to their attention. Having to deal with this also sucked because i planned to visit artists alley saturday night after the dealer room closed but had to spend 4 hours dealing with this situation after they apprehended him. If you have any information related to this, PLEASE email me immediately. Unlike many other 'companies' he could have used as part of his scam, most people he probably victimized come to this website on a regular basis and i'd like to show this person that you can't pull something like this on me, Megatokyo and it's fans.

Oh, T Campbell took a picture of the sign Hawk drew up for us that we had posted at our booth. :)

If for some reason you email me and do not hear back in the next few days, my spam filter may have tagged it. Try sending me a msg in the forums.

Right now, i gotta get back to the comic. It's been a week... time to jump back into the fray and start focusing on comics for a while. I appreciate your patience with the past few months.