Is that the store...

...where Diddlbiker bought his DSRL camera? Yes! It is! You would never think that this building in Brooklyn houses Ace Photo & Digital - an address that I got in the first place because they're selling through Amazon!
How did I get this picture? First of all, apologies for shameless deeplinking, but I don't think it's causing any problems with the (lack of) traffic that this blog is generating. There is this guy in Brooklyn, Don Wiss, has made a list of storefronts of Brooklyn camera stores.
Somehow, most of the mail order shops that one can find on the internet are located in Brooklyn, NY. They all have a few things in common - good looking website, horrible looking 'storefront' for instance.
Not every crummy store is manned by crooks, but there is no doubt that the chances of getting ripped off have a pretty linear relation to how bad the store looks. For now, I've decided to stick with stores that sell at the street as well - B&H, Adorama, but also Abes of Main and ShopSunshine. I got more observant after visiting Don's website, so while going through the invoices of different vendors I also noticed that the invoices are (apart from business address, etc) each other clones. There must be some turnkey package that allows you to run a webstore right out of the box, add some pictures and off you go. Lesson learned: be more careful when buying online (and use paypal where available)