We, The IMVU Mafias, were born as an IMVU group for free credits and IMVU tricks / tips. The group was named, "$$$ No Joke Free Credits $$$", with thousands of members. Developers protested our group with accusations that we were just a bunch of brats trying to get free stuff ... filling our group with pictures gore, literal shit, and death threats. One developer accused us of being an organized crime syndicate and said we were worse than the mafia. After a while, IMVU staff deleted our group because we were too large and unruly to control. As a result, I moved us to our own site and named us "The IMVU Mafias" after the accusations of developers that we were like a mafia.

Spoiler: CLICK SHOW FOR FULL STORY

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Story of how our family was born:

(September 1st 2006)
Don, a young foolish computer programmer is pushed out of his leadership position in his home town, and decides to move into the city of IMVU. Ok, sort of ... more like, the video game he previously modded lost popularity and he was looking for something new. Poor, with big dreams, but lacking a credit card nor any form of ID, which was needed back then on IMVU to get a job or money to start a business, Don searches high and low for free credits. Don meets many friends during his search, children begging on the street, foreigners with the same problems as Don, and bands of thieves who pray on the weak. Hackers and scammers run the streets of IMVU, offering free credits, but only dealing servitude, stealing from the people they promise to help.

(March 8th 2007)
Over time, Don finds ways to earn credits for free, learning many tips and tricks, and who to avoid. Don is sickened by how no one is helping the poor begging on the streets of IMVU, leaving them to be prayed on by the thieves, and ridiculed by the rich. One day, the government of IMVU (IMVU staff) made begging illegal, and the authorities (IMVU Staff) begins slaughtering the children begging on the street. (Disabling Accounts) In response, Don uses his credits and knowledge of IMVU to start a small business to bring the children off of the street, and provide them with free credits. The name of this business was, "$$$No Joke, Free Credits$$$".

(May 16th 2007)
Eventually so many IMVU users are flocking to Don, that he needs help running his business. Don notices 5 young beautifully hot girls, all a couple years younger than himself, who he had helped, retuning to the business day after day, staying loyal, socializing with the other customers, and helping Don chase after the thieves who occasionally attempted to prey off of the members of our family. The young girls were given jobs helping Don, and the business thrived on for many months, helping thousands of people. Together, we discover and share over 50 different methods to earn free credits and products on IMVU. (this was before IMVU had surveys / offers for earning credits, so our methods were a pretty big deal, extremely popular)

(Nov 1st 2007)
Don went on vacation, leaving the group in the hands of his beautiful assistants for 3 days. While Don was gone, one of the girls gave a dev a compliment, and in return the dev gave her a gift. The girl decided to try it again, and left compliments on all of the pages of the richest devs in IMVU. Again and again, she recived gift after gift, so she decided to spread the good news around our family. Soon all of our members were doing this and comparing results, figuring out the best compliments, posting up the names of devs who had given them gifts. Eventualy, a list of devs was composed who always give gifts to anyone who gives them a good review.

3 Days latter, Don returns, and the thousands of our family members were all running around making friends with devs and receiving thousands of free gifts.

(Nov 7th 2007)

One of the devs contacts Don and requests to be taken off the list. Don complies with her request, and her name is removed from the list, but the dev decides to tell her mother who works for IMVU, and her mother decides to post a public thread notifying the dev community of our business.

Over the next day, several more devs request to be taken off the list, and they are taken off. Late during the night, a group of devs build up an army, break into the business, harass the members, and graffiti the walls (spam our threads) with threats and pictures of dead children bearing the message "this is what happens to fucking brats who want free credits". Don and the girls easily clean up the mess, take note of the people who harassed the group, and take shifts guarding / moderating the the group. One of the girls gets scared during her shift when a man threatens her, and she runs.

(Nov 8th 2007)
A list is comprised out of all the members of our family, a list of our thousands of members, and the list is passed around IMVU as a block list. Late that night, the devs hired professional hackers and soldiers (trolls) to attack our group. By the next morning, one girl had been killed / h4c|<7d (can no longer get into her account, her account continues to login though, and is forced to break TOS till she is disabled 2 days latter). Two more girls were missing in action (their accounts simply never logged in again, and they never contacted us with another account). Only myself, 1 other girl, and one goth guy who had recently joined us were still left fighting; moderating our group.

(Nov 9th 2007)
IMVU's staff promises to allow our business to continue operating and promises that we will be protected if the dev gift-list is taken down. Don removes the dev list, yet the fighting continues well into the afternoon. Don decides to meet with the leaders of the enemy army, and tries to negotiate peace. Half of the enemy leaders agree to peace and thank don for removing the list, but the other half are determined to have all of our family wiped from IMVU. When the fighting continues, Don tells the remaining girl and guy, our last 2 moderators, to run while they still can. The new guy flees, but the other last girl remains to fight along side Don.

(Nov 14th 2007)
IMVU staff contacts us again, and admits that our group is too large to protect, and that the IMVU groups system is too simple to moderate a group of our size. IMVU staff recomends that we move everything to our own website with our own forms, with acutal moderation tools that can handle our size. They even recommend a good phpbb host, to host our forums on. We are given a deadline, 1 week to move everything to our own website.


(Nov 20th 2007)
Late that night, 1 day short of the deadline we were given, our original business was burned to the ground, everything that remained was confiscated and given to the CEO of IMVU. All of the research done by the group was locked in a government vault to be studied by IMVU's engineers. 13%, 250 / 2000+ members of the original group had been lost to the enemy army who merciously hunted down and killed our members.

(Nov 21st 2007)
Don and the remaining girl, Firecat, survived to make The IMVU Mafias. Over the next 3 days, Don changed his name to Don Von Free Credits (this was before he was known as Don Von Alpha Dom), and built a huge fortress full of secret underground labs where he could continue his IMVU research. Don then h4c|<7d Nino, the CEO of IMVU, breaking into his vault and stealing back all of the free credit methods, tips, and tricks, to be given back to the citizens of IMVU who visited the fortress, the website, of the IMVU Mafias.

Don was soon joined by his first capo's (heads of the family) over the next month: Firecat, Coolio, Bitchani, Falcon, and Don Von Jr

FireCat - a brave soldier who bravly fought on to save our original business, when everyone around her was dieing or running, our original Capo of Global Moderation

Coolio - a poor gangster with a talent for graphic arts who Don took off the street to make graphics for the family and run social events, our original Capo of Arts and Communication

Bitchani - the widow of an American GI who was left with a child and without the money to buy credits, she was the first ever member of our rear guard, in charge of testing submitted methods, and protecting the family from hackers, scammers, crackers, and thieves, our original Capo of the Guard

Falcon - originally known as CrapMan Of IMVU, was banned from our shoutbox for spamming, he then learned the rules of the IMVU Mafias and helped keep our threads clean, for his services, he slowly made his way up through the ranks of the family, our original Underboss

Don Von Jr - a little boy who looked up to Don and followed his examples, always trying to help the family and mimicking Don Von Free Credits, our original Consigliere

IMVU openly sold trigger dicks and other sex products in their catalog from 2004 - July of 2007, and would often advertise their site as a sex simulator on porn websites, such as porn hub, with images of avatars having sex and the slogan "IMVU - beyond reality". They had to stop because their financial accounts were frozen for breaking international laws. IMVU services countries where porn is illegal and uses payment gateways that have to abide by those laws. That's the entire reason why dicks are not allowed to get hard on IMVU and why pelvises are not allowed to touch on IMVU. The great castration (the day IMVU banned trigger dicks) happened in July of 2007. To make up for lost profits, IMVU rebranded their site as "family friendly" and started selling gift cards for IMVU in toy stores. Our site was born November 27th 2007. We did not release our first nude suit / GA nude h4c|< till July 2009 and we did not sell our first sex product till December 2010. From 2007 - 2011 our site was mostly about free credits, free products, and free VIP. 2010 - 2011 was when we focused on security and removing large h4c|<7r groups from IMVU. 2011 - 2012 we were mostly about ripping and recovering banned IMVU products / resources. 2013 - 2016 we were mostly about the adult revolution, bringing back sex products to IMVU and creating tools that add functionality to IMVU. 2016 we focused our investments on security, product development / product development tools, and automation of existing site systems. By 2019 we reduced the risk of loosing sex products to near zero and have upheld that low level of risk through consistent development and research for nearly 4 years.

Journal Entry, 2019 - Yes, stories of a single man taking out 30 - 120 accounts in a single night, all belonging to an enemy mafia family who got out of hand are true. The size and scale of the attacks were insane. You use to see stuff like that more often back in 2007 - 2013, during what I like to refer to as the "golden years" of the mafia community on IMVU, back when there were dozens of large active families and around a hundred small families. At its height, 1/4th of all people on IMVU were polled as knowing of / about the mafias on IMVU. Most of the families each had at least 1 h4c|<7r on staff, contracted third party hackers from outside of IMVU, or in a few rare cases ... had a small team of pros. There literally use to be a public wiki on our site for simply keeping track of all of the mafia families on IMVU and their alliances and umbrellaed businesses. It was common for families to hold classes or start multi-family schools for training new talent. Wars and skirmishes between families were just as common as peace and alliances. Some of the wars and the stories behind them were pretty ridiculous; stuff out of legend. Our own family (The TIM Family) use to run a white hat school on security and Intel, which around half the families on IMVU use to send their troops to. IMVU inc cracked down on security pretty hard back in 2010 - 2012; by 2013 ... most of the security holes in IMVU that allowed stuff like that to happen were closed. During those years, the families survived by allying into larger and larger factions. In 2012 there was a large war between most of the mafia families ... and they all tore each other apart or fled the scene till only a single faction stood. Early 2013 IMVU staff cracked down on what remained ... going directly after individual accounts on mass instead of simply closing security holes ... all you see now are whispers and shadows of what use to be. This site remains intact and in use as a business hub, but the gigantic multi-faceted mafia community that use to openly stretch across all of IMVU is no more. Everything is underground now and quiet; there has not been a large mafias vs mafias war involving large scale hackers since 2013. I've heard that some of the non-English speaking families survived and thrived, since IMVU staff had a harder time tracking them ... but for the most part its just role-players, fakes, and small retired cells that are left ... hanging out underground and telling stories of what use to be while running what remains of their businesses.

UPDATE 2020: A world wide pandemic has hit the IMVU community. As a result, people are staying inside at home, with too much time on their hands. Many of the old mafia legends have returned to IMVU and a new generation of mafiosos are forming around them. Three factions of mafia families have formed, totaling around 3 dozen families. All of the families are organizing via a chat service called "Discord", where they each have their own server. There seems to be some sort of understanding between the families, that peace shall be held. No one is at war. Every other day large parties and events are held open to mafiosos of all families. This is a time of peace and prosperity.