You were gaslit through heavily controlled communication? Say it ain't so, that must have been awful.
I can't believe someone would use money to take over a productive communication forum to manipulate the information there for their own gain. What kind of awful dishonest person would participate in something like that?
On one side, we have a company using a shady business model, trying to pick a fight with a notorious internet personality. Sounds like a bad use of their time, but if they were looking for visibility, well, they found it.
On the other side, we have an internet personality making a fuss out of trollish email he could safely answer with a single-line reply ("put up or shut up"). Sounds like a bad use of his time, but if he was looking for (renewed) visibility, well, he got it.
And then there is me reading about this nonsensical crap. Which was definitely a bad use of my time.
Given how all participants in the discussion were very focused on transferring ownership to the attacker I'd treat everyone in the entire e-mail thread with suspicion. I would not be surprised if Dennis Ens, the one who started the thread in the first place, was also a sock puppet of Jia Tan.
I run a web BBS, and we had to deal with my competitor spamming imageboards. It didn't do him much good (because he's finally gone), but he gained infamy because of the incident, thus ruining his real life and causing him much debt.
"After searching my huge personal archive of hacked cybercrime forums for Andrew’s various email and Jabber addresses, I found several private messages sent by different users on the Spamdot[dot]biz forum who recommended to other members the “ikaikki@neko.im” Jabber address as someone to contact in order to hire a service that could be used to flood someone’s Gmail inbox with tens or hundreds of thousands of junk messages."
several private messages sent by different users on the Spamdot[dot]biz forum who recommended to other members...
So, an archive of illegally obtained private communication? (Or, is it just questionably obtained by having several false identities across boards? The term hacked forums seems to suggest otherwise)...
I guess that by doing illegal surveillance, one kind find out things that aren't obvious. How surprising.
A kid offering spamming and hacked twitter accounts using the same account on the forums too, so I doubt anybody did any real research into this person before sending him money.
I would've cut down on communicating with the person. He's obviously illiterate and his income is fueled by fraud. In my experience, you give them a single friendly but frank email with 24 hours to respond and then you just have to go through the proper channels. In this case removing his domain.
I'd like to believe the good in people. But, this individual's conduct from the outset demonstrates bad faith.
it seemed to be part of some larger 'communication and marketing' package he was subscribed to. I was getting monthly email updates, etc - ghostwritten by someone else. It wasn't bad, but video responses to everything was annoying. It felt like he was intentionally trying to hide something.
I was on the other end of of one of these campaigns. It was extremely distressing, having fictional articles pop up every other day. The dispute was over a post I made outing a scammer. In the end (2 months and 50 posts) I folded and removed the post.
After I made peace with the scammers I was then contacted by a reputation management company that tried to extort more cash from me and started posting more articles. Thankfully it ended when I didn't respond.
It's really the lowest level of entrepreneurialism and one that should be shunned. When I have some spare money I will tell the internet that i'm an astronaut just to prove a point.
I would have taken his legit email and after some time subscribed him to a dozen goat porn sites. Man, I hate such people: they ruined the Internet for the rest of us, and the public steadily migrating from the open web or USENET to proprietary centralized closed systems is also in part because of them.
Apparently they have IRC logs of him first talking about selling the information to spammers or using it to go phishing, which makes it a little worse.
Reminds me a bit of an experience I had at an event around 2000 or so. Most of the folks there were heavily academic, but at lunch I found myself sitting with one of the organizers who was clearly cut from different cloth, so I asked what he did the rest of the year. After a couple of rounds of vague responses about how he helped companies use email to get in touch with potential customers, it finally dawned on me that I was sitting at the table with a SPAMMER. Pretty much lost my appetite at that point.
My takeaway is that spammers, malware authors, even identity thieves, are among us. They can seem like perfectly nice people. They might even be perfectly nice people except for this one bad habit, this one ethical blind spot, that enables them to do things from which the rest of us would recoil in disgust. The company in this story might be an extreme case, but I'll bet a lot of people asking "how could they not know" have themselves worked at companies that made at least some of their money in less savory ways. Sometimes it might be why that company survived while contemporaries faded away. Silicon Valley from its earliest days has been full of people who benefited from carefully redacted history, whether they knew it or not.
I can't believe someone would use money to take over a productive communication forum to manipulate the information there for their own gain. What kind of awful dishonest person would participate in something like that?
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