by generalsjoes | Apr 13, 2012 | G.I. Joe, G.I. Joe 25th Anniversary, G.I. Joe Collectors Club
Well isn’t this a fine Friday morning surprise?
An email received from the G.I. Joe Collectors Club reveals that they have started shipping their membership exclusive figures for 2012! For us 3 3/4″ Real American Hero fans, that means Footloose should be in hand within the next few weeks! Woo hoo!
The letter also provides some instructions for renewing memberships within the new Club online store system. Check out the full email below!
Here are the latest updates from the G.I. Joe Collectors’ Club:
SURPRISE! This week we started mailing the FREE membership figures for 2012! We were able to get these manufactured much earlier this year, so off they go to you! It will take several weeks for them to reach all of the membership, so please be patient. If you don’t receive your figure by the end of May, please let us know.
In your April issue of the Club Magazine, you will find a letter that offers: credit card fraud counseling; instructions on how to place a credit alert on your accounts; and a free one-year subscription to a Credit Monitoring and Identity Theft Recovery Service that we have purchased on your behalf.
If you have received any evidence of fraud on your credit cards, please call and make a report with the 800 number listed in the letter for the recovery services.
If you desire to take advantage of the Credit Monitoring and Identity Theft Recovery Service, your letter contains an individually assigned certificate number that will allow you to activate the service. Do not share this certificate number with anyone as it is a one-time use certificate. In addition, you will need to activate your service by June 15, 2012. This service will last for 12 months once you activate it. Again, we apologize for any issues this problem has caused our membership.
Please note that your Club Magazine will be approximately 2 weeks later than normal as we wanted to give you time to check your mailing addresses in the new Club Store before we used it for the first mailing. You should receive your issue by May 4th. Please contact us after that date if you have not received your magazine.
Next week we will have the memberships back in the store. If you need to renew, all you have to do is put a credit card on file before your billing date (see My Account when you log in). The system will bill your renewal on that date. If you expire, you will need to go to the store, select the membership of your choice and check out. Then you will start again with the next mailing.
Finally, we are still working on getting all of our software and process back to normal. We hope to have registration available for G.I. Joe Con soon. We will send out an email when this is online.
Thanks for your support!
Brian
by generalsjoes | Apr 5, 2012 | G.I. Joe, G.I. Joe 25th Anniversary, G.I. Joe Collectors Club, G.I. Joe Convention, JoeCon 2012, Show and Convention Coverage
Well lookee here!
The G.I. Joe Collectors’ Club has ended a relative silence over the past month or two with a whopper of an update! The 2012 G.I. Joe Convention website has officially launched, and they’ve posted a teaser image. That teaser image is HUGE.
It looks like none other than Daina from the Oktober Guard. Wow. A modern era style Oktober Guard is something fans have been clamoring for over the past few years, and by the looks of things, we’ll be getting our wish. I wonder who they might be battling against?
We know that o-ring tooling is more or less gone, so it stands to reason that we’ll be getting a modern era update for these classic characters. The interesting thing to me will be how the Club writes these characters into the modern mythology. If they do end up doing updates for the classic characters like Horror Show or Brekhov or Stormavik, will they try and write them into their modern universe considering they died back in the Special Missions comic? Or are we only going to get Oktober Guard members who are still alive like Daina, Gorky, Misha, and Dragonsky.
I really hope the Club does ignore some of the deaths and gives us modern updates of those classic Oktober Guard characters, but I guess time will tell how they handle it. I’m just excited that there is some Convention news to discuss!
Check it all out right here, and make sure you keep looking there, as more teasers are bound to be posted, not to mention the full blown convention brochure coming up soon. JoeCon reveals! One of my most favorite times of the year!
by generalsjoes | Mar 29, 2012 | 30th Anniversary, Comics and Cartoons, G.I. Joe, G.I. Joe 25th Anniversary, G.I. Joe Collectors Club, G.I. Joe Comics, G.I. Joe Toys, Pursuit of COBRA
With both the March and April newsletters running behind schedule, the G.I. Joe Collectors’ Club has posted a terrific sneak preview of their upcoming April issue on GIJoeClub.com!
I’ve gone on record saying that the newsletter has been hugely improved as of late, mostly pointing to the excellent comic contained within, featuring very cool cameos by many familiar GIJCC universe characters. Looks like this continues on in April, where we see a great preview page of the comic featuring Nano-BAT, Footloose, Jammer, Gaucho, Quarrel, and Sparta! An awesome selection of GIJCC themed designs, and I love seeing them in comic book form. This is pretty much what I envisioned when I produced the dio comics for the newsletter a few years ago, but unfortunately my own schedule prevented me from continuing past 3 story arcs. I commend the folks doing this comic for doing some great work here.
Check out the sneak preview on GIJoeClub.com!
by generalsjoes | Mar 28, 2012 | G.I. Joe, G.I. Joe Collectors Club
A little late in posting this, but the following email came through last night:
“Here is the latest update on the credit card security investigation.
The firm we have hired to analyze our former ecommerce server and software has preliminarily determined that we did incur a SQL injection code attack sometime before Christmas. Our ISP did have a commercial product installed that was supposed to defeat these types of attacks, but apparently it failed.
This allowed the hackers access to our order information. While it is still unknown exactly what data they were able to harvest (investigation continues) we need to assume that they were able to extract all of our order information. The security firm thinks that this attack has allowed the hackers to come back periodically and harvest more information. However, once the old server was taken out of service (around February 21st) there was nothing left for them to access.
Once this information was stolen, (no matter if it was back before Christmas) there is no time frame as to when the thieves may sell or try to use the information to purport credit card theft.
What does this mean to me?
We are asking again that anyone who has used a credit card in our old online systems in the past year (NOT THE NEW STORE) to get your card replaced immediately. If you have done this already, there is no action required on your part.
We apologize for the inconvenience, we know this whole thing is a pain, but it is better to replace the cards than have to deal with any issues that may result from this theft of data. Even though the amount of fraud has greatly declined, we are still receiving a customer report every few days of someone else (who hasn’t replaced their cards) getting hit. We strongly encourage you to take this step immediately if you have not done so already. Again, this DOES NOT pertain to any cards that have been used in the new store.
What is the plan?
We are still working on all of the issues and are several weeks away from a final resolution. Our new store is currently offline while we complete the entries and audit the data from the renewals we received last week. Just to reiterate, this new store is a totally different piece of software, at a totally different hosting site. There are hundreds of other retailers using this same software as it is hosted by the software creators.
We hope to have the store online and registration system back online sometime next week. When the store comes back online, we will be adding products slowly so it will take some time to have everything back in the store.
Thank you for your patience and support during this trying issue.
Brian”
Speaking as someone with an IT background and as the security officer for an agency that must comply with HIPAA security regulations, I’m pretty discouraged that it was a SQL injection account that was able to generate all of this hassle. That’s a pretty baseline hacking tool that is fairly easily defended against, so if the fault lies with their ISP, I dearly hope Fun Publications is taking them to task over this.
The good news is, the audit is complete and hopefully things will get rolling on the new site soon. Looking forward to moving on and getting ready for JoeCon and the FSS!
by generalsjoes | Mar 26, 2012 | G.I. Joe, G.I. Joe Collectors Club, G.I. Joe Retaliation Toys, G.I. Joe Toys
Another day another carded G.I. Joe: Retaliation figure reveal! This time around it’s Snake Eyes.
As someone who has actually gotten his hands on the Retaliation Snake Eyes figure, this is one hell of a cool toy, and I strongly encourage fence-sitters to at least give it a whirl. Great articulation, great design…a very cool figure overall.
Check out the carded picture at GIJoeClub.com
