The FriendsReunited Conspiracy (?) - Part 9 – Latest Update

If you haven’t been reading this series of blogs then catch up at http://spankyrant.blogspot.co.uk/

This blog is an update of a few developments to bring you right up to date.

I am going to rush through the communication we have had with these people since they sent their document in August.

We were completely shocked by that document and its allegations against us. But more shocking were the tactics they had used for the past 7 years without our knowledge. Don’t forget that in their last communication back in 2005 we were told they “won’t pester us again”.

Of course this was completely untrue, as you have seen from my previous blogs. The continual insinuation and calling us liars I can sort of cope with. My strategy after meeting them was to ignore them from then on. However, seeing the tactics they had used – such as engaging Private Investigators to follow, snoop on, stake out and harass friends, as well as people we do not even know – was appalling in the extreme: it had to be stopped somehow. Whenever we went out, we started looking over our shoulders and started to suspect PI’s at every corner. Paranoid maybe, but that’s what these people have done to us.

Therefore my first approach was to go legal. I had never ever gone legal personally in my life, but our pursuers’ activities raised many legal questions and I haven’t even started to discuss these yet. I asked them for information about the use of private investigators, fraud squad officers and other professionals, and of the illicitly taped conversations they had made without permission, and much more. I wanted full disclosure of their practices.

Here’s what happened – we received a reply, unsigned, and from whom we don’t know, saying we were now harassing them, together with plenty of other self-serving comments.  It included the wonderful statement that they are:

“currently finalising negotiations for a global publishing deal for a book which will be presented as the UK’s version of Social Networking.”

(Fellows: it’s called ‘The Social Network’ by the way!!!)

It was this 2-page reply that resulted in my decision to start blogging about these events. The legal options could wait for the time being.

So, as you may or may not have read, I started blogging about this last month.

From my first blog I invited them to put their claims as comments on my blogs or start blogging themselves. That was always their desire – to get it out in public.

Over the last month a few things have happened.

Because of my blogging, some people who knew nothing about this have contacted me with further insight into our pursuers’ tactics. I’ll leave these for another time.

On 12^th November, our chief pursuer sent an email from a new email address. However, the new email address included their old website’s name, and (possibly because that website no longer exists) it went into my lawyer’s junk mail folder. [Never has the term junk mail been more appropriate.] Because we didn’t reply to the email, they sent another one on 22^nd – we managed to pick this one up and hence found the earlier one. Sorry about that – these things happen. I suspect the content of this paragraph will get incorporated into their conspiracy somehow.

That second email was amazing. It was sent after my factual blog last week – but even after all those facts had been clearly disclosed it still included statements like this:

“Were they actually involved in the start up?”

I have got to say I found this staggering.

We didn’t reply and we’re not going to – since they still maintain that they are going to publish their own documents. Fine – we want them to.

This week I got an email sent directly to me.  Lots more of the same but with this:

“you are welcome to a preview of a response to your Blog which you may post or withhold at your own discretion”

Why would I want to do that? Just publish your own stuff.

As I know that our pursuers are reading these blogs, what follows is my message to them.We are not going to reply to any of your direct emails. One of the reasons for this is that anything we say or write in response is twisted, turned and manipulated to conform to your mooted conspiracy. Therefore:

• ·      Just reply or blog away
• ·      At the same time publish your document
• ·      Put live your www.reward4information.com website (seems to be something unrelated at the moment)
• ·      Let everyone know who you are. Each of your last three emails has been sent anonymously, which is odd behaviour for people who claim to be seeking nothing other than the truth.
• ·      Once done I will even help promote your document through the social media I use, and encourage comments on it.

Come on – stop talking about it and JFDI.

@spankyhurst


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The FriendsReunited Conspiracy (?)– Part 8 – The Crime or Mistakes, Memory and Analysis

In summary a group of people have been after me for years and have completed a 12-year investigation into the history of FR in an attempt to discredit me. They allege that we copied the idea from them through contact with a developer that they had engaged to write their website, and that we lied about our launch and have been doing so ever since. They have been contacting us on and off for 7 years.

For background to this story read:

Part 1 - Introduction

http://spankyrant.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-friendsreunited-conspiracy-part-1.html

Part 2 – The Claim

http://spankyrant.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-friendsreunited-conspiracy-part-2.html

Part 3 – The Contact

http://spankyrant.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-friendsreunited-conspiracy-part-3.html

Part 4 – The Email

http://spankyrant.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-friendsreunited-conspiracy-part-4.html

Part 5 – The Document

http://spankyrant.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-friendsreunited-conspiracy-part-5.html

Part 6 – The Connection

http://spankyrant.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-friendsreunited-conspiracy-part-6.html

Part 7 – The Facts

http://spankyrant.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-friendsreunited-conspiracy-part-7.html

In this section I am going to talk about how we’ve managed to get into this sorry mess. These people have completely invented a conspiracy, apparently based on our inability to remember every little detail of what we did or said 12 years ago.

And in looking at some of these areas, I’ll show how all of these things are a bit catching – in the fact that our pursuers seem to have suffered memory loss, and made unforced errors themselves, on quite a few occasions.

Lets just face it – we all make mistakes, and we are all forgetful. However I don’t think I have ever been so analysed, taken apart and picked up on every little detail like this before.

The Mistakes

As I have mentioned before, a huge part of what this is all about is that Julie and I are liars. And this allegation all comes about from a simple error. Once again I will explain for their benefit, as it never gets through.

We were sent a letter in 2005 from these people asking a number of apparently innocent questions about the early stages of FR. The letter from memory (and don’t forget I am apparently awful at that) said they were doing a research project. One question asked was who our first hosting company was. In fact, we initially used a small outfit called Aflex and moved about 6 months later to one called Densitron. [Julie was not involved in any of the technical side or server setup. And this was years after the event when we had been with Densitron for some 5 years by then.] So she answered Densitron. SHE GOT IT WRONG. Big deal. Or so you would think.

And then, soon afterwards when asked by one of these people about the hosting I also mistakenly said Densitron (incorrectly) and he corrected me. Again, what a crime. This of course was all very suspicious and obviously indicated that we were lying and trying to cover something up.

Now I have only actually read their document from cover to cover about 3 times. I made loads of notes on the second read. And blimey do they make mistakes. Let me go briefly down to their level and be pedantic.

So here’s a bit of proof reading on their investigation document – and these are just a few. You would have thought after 12 years they would have put a bit more effort into this.

• On page 7, a fraud squad officer somehow claims to have seen some invoices from the hosting company Chorver in January 2001:

“We can confirm that Chorver sent their first invoice to Happy Group in January 2001. This will not doubt be recorded in Chorver’s official documentation and would be impossible to change”

No, I have no idea how they got hold of these invoices either- but don’t worry I will discuss the legal ramifications of that later. However, Chorver as a company did not even exist until 2003. Yes, he probably meant Densitron. A mistake! Hang on though. So he has written down the wrong hosting company then. Didn’t Julie do exactly just that which caused this whole conspiracy and for us to be branded liars. What a bunch of hypocrites this lot are!

• On page 15 – they get my name wrong and call me by their developer’s name.
• On a number of pages they call our company the Happy Party Group for some reason, whereas Happy Party was the name of one of our sites – but Happy Group Limited was our company name.
• They visited a friend of ours on page 12 (this is a shocking section that I will discuss at another time). They describe her as a director from the original FR team. No idea where they got that from: she worked with us from about 2002 on FR and was never a director.
• On page 16, there is a section which describes events when we met the main pursuer and the Private Investigator who accompanied him. In one sentence the PI is called Chris, and by the next he is called Alex. Split personality? No – just a simple mistake of course.

As you can see some seriously bad, indeed embarrassing, errors. They do, however, expose the slap-dash and shoddy nature of their investigation. You would have thought people trying to do something like this would have checked basic facts about company names and directors, let alone proof-read their document to get peoples’ names correct.

But enough of the mistakes.  I think I’ve made my point.

The Memory

Think back to what you were doing back in the summer of 2000. I struggle to remember what I was doing last weekend, let alone 12 years ago. However, in their document we are constantly picked up on everything we say where we are either vague or not able to remember details. And every single hesitation, indication of uncertainty or mistake is interpreted as hinting at the conspiracy that we have so assiduously put together.

Well, I apologise for my crap memory. Unfortunately, we didn’t take the time to document every part of our lives so that we could relate conversations back to people when they enquired about them years later.

Amazingly, however, as far back as 2000 our pursuers were taking a different tack:

“Immediately after the meeting while parked outside in their car, both xxxxxxxxxxxxx minuted & then discussed xxxxx’s comments in detail”

Wow – they really did document everything, even before a problem happened. Perhaps if they just got on with building their idea, rather than documenting every meeting, they might have got further.

But let’s again just look at their own memory. I suggest it’s very selective. Don’t forget: much of the basis for the conspiracy they impute is our failure immediately to recall a trivial detail from 12 years ago. But in their document, concerning a meeting with their developer on 24^th May 2005, they state about a fact he remembers from 5 years previously that

“it is totally & utterly inconceivable that he could have possibly remembered this brief & casual remark at all”.

The irony of this statement. I love it.

And whilst on the memory front. When trying to jog that awful memory of mine this year I managed to boot up an old laptop (btw – rusting is a figure of speech, you stupid people). I found an email from these people from 2002. It was in a pile (oh dear – another metaphor) of emails to do with FR received in 2002. We got thousands of emails a day – many like their, so it had just been passed onto me for information only. It was an email from them asking us if we wanted to purchase their website ! When I met him and asked about it, unbelievably he seemed to have forgotten about it. So they contacted us to try and sell us their business, and they can’t remember that fact. A little careless, wouldn’t you say ?

And also in 2005, after we were told by our chief pursuer that he would go away and leave us alone, we were contacted by a Times journalist who had received a dossier on how we stole the idea from him. Nothing was printed in the Times, of course, but when I questioned him, he apparently knew nothing about it. So he sends a dossier to one of our leading broadsheet newspapers (who rebuff him), but doesn’t recall anything of it.  Funny old thing that memory, isn’t it ?

The Analysis

The whole 21-page summary document that our chief pursuer sent us is a chronological time-line of meetings and communications. Everything is then analysed and given the full conspiracy treatment. Having just gone back to it for the first time in ages, it no longer annoys me – in fact I’m now seeing it as a work of paranoid comedy. Here are a few classic entries:

“ It was quite clear that he was aware of the name all along but was trying in some way to pretend that he did not remember it”

and another

“It looks like she was primed and ready for a different approach by our Private Detective, and made the “wrong” phone call”

and there’s an amount of

“Steve, trying very hard to sound casual”

So – before going any further, you people should take a long look in the mirror and examine your own errors, your own memory, and perhaps do a bit of self-analysis. And be very careful about branding people as liars.

Coming Very Soon – The FriendsReunited Conspiracy (?) – Part 9 – The Latest Developments

@spankyhurst

The FriendsReunited Conspiracy (?)– Part 7 – The Facts

In summary a group of people have been after me for years and have completed a 12-year investigation into the history of FR in an attempt to discredit me. They allege that we copied the idea from them through contact with a developer that they had engaged to write their website, and that we lied about our launch and have been doing so ever since. They have been contacting us on and off for 7 years.

For background to this story read:

Part 1 - Introduction

http://spankyrant.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-friendsreunited-conspiracy-part-1.html

Part 2 – The Claim

http://spankyrant.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-friendsreunited-conspiracy-part-2.html

Part 3 – The Contact

http://spankyrant.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-friendsreunited-conspiracy-part-3.html

Part 4 – The Email

http://spankyrant.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-friendsreunited-conspiracy-part-4.html

Part 5 – The Document

http://spankyrant.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-friendsreunited-conspiracy-part-5.html

Part 6 – The Connection

http://spankyrant.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-friendsreunited-conspiracy-part-6.html

OK – so far the blogs have been all about these people. This one I’m afraid is going to be a bit boring and long. I’ve sort of gone to town on it so sorry if it’s a bit dull in places. 

Before I start, bear in mind this timing issue.  In order to have any chance of showing that we nicked the idea from them, these people need to be able to demonstrate that we did not come up with the FR idea before some time in July or August 2000 (when, they say, they disclosed the idea for their “innovative” web-based reunion concept to a developer).

Now read on…

The domain registration date and the invoice we showed them back in 2005 should have been ample proof to any reasonable person of our story, and put an end to everything. There was (and is) no reason why we should have to justify any more of our lives to these people.

However these people have crossed a line (as outlined in previous Blogs). And whilst I started to reminisce about how we started FR, I realised it was sort of quite fun and I began to enjoy it. Not the reason why I was doing it, but the gathering of information -  bit of FriendsReunited Reunited.

Also, in telling the story to friends and family involved around that time, a lot of them felt compelled to help and put pen to paper as well because they were as angry as me – and for that I am very grateful.

Now onto the history of FriendsReunited and the thing that these people are obsessed with but do little about - FACTS. All of this has been told to these people repeatedly over the years and a lot of it is in the public domain.

The idea

The story of how Julie came up with the idea has been well documented. In summary: in 1999, whilst she was pregnant, Julie managed using the Internet to track down a lost relative. This inspired her to think that the advent of the power of the web could be used to track down old school friends and find out what they were up to and where they were now.

We and Jason (who was my business partner already) were all in full time work. We had lots of other ideas contributed by friends or originated by ourselves. It wasn’t until after our daughter was born in January 2000 that Jason and I decided to give up our current contracts and have a go at some of the ideas.

I can get statements from dozens of people about these facts and what happened in 1999. Here is one example from a friend – I have many more.

“I remember at a friends gathering held at Barnet where Steve asked us to brainstorm ideas for websites, as he was thinking of changing directions in his career and wanted input. I had recently left South Wales and had just settled in my new home, placing this meeting in the Autumn months of 1999. At this meeting a number of ideas were put forward, one for a fantasy football site, another for retail service site for children’s parties, another for a light hearted daily picture site and another for getting in touch with your old school friends (Friends Reunited). This last one was suggested by Julie. The pregnancy had triggered wonderings and musings of the whereabouts and exploits of her former school friends. She was very enthusiastic about this it was clear to me this was an original idea born out by Julie due to her pregnancy.”

Jason and myself started playing around with some of the ideas for the rest of 1999 and with my daughter being born in January 2000 we were obviously very busy. 

Development

HappyGroup was formed around February 2000. Its plan was to try out lots of websites that we wrote ourselves, very quickly and very cheaply, to see if any had legs.

The school reunion idea that Julie had was one of these.

Four friends invested some seed money to enable us to try out our ideas. Each of them can provide proof of this and that the school reunion idea was one of the early ones. See below a statement from one of our first investors.

“I first met you and Jason in December 1994 when you started working for CTC on a contract basis. Over the next 6 years you were instrumental in developing CTC's initial internet based developments.

During that time we had many conversations about use of the web outside the financial services sphere in which CTC works. These culminated in the first quarter of 2000 with your proposals to set up the Happy Group to develop a number of ideas - which included the Friends Reunited website. My colleague and myself assisted you with the development of business plans and this culminated with our agreeing to provide you with part of the initial funding you needed in April 2000.”

I have three more investors with statements about their involvement.

We worked on a number of small sites, whilst still keeping down a reduced consultancy role. Around this time it became clear that Julie was not going to be able to get involved in actually developing the sites – originally the plan had been for her to learn these new skills whilst on maternity leave. But anyone who knows what it’s like to have a new baby will appreciate the demands of parenting.

In spring 2000 we bought our own server and rented out rack space and bandwidth in a small ISP called Aflex in NW London. A friend had recommended them to us.

At the same time in spring 2000 I started the early stages of writing the school reunion website. In was also around this time Julie decided on the name FriendsReunited. The site didn’t take long to write. I am a database developer not a graphic designer, so I knocked up very quickly the first version of the site ready to put live. There was no need for expensive design - that was our strategy - as we had no idea if people would actually use it.

Below is a statement by a work colleague and friend.

“Shortly after Steve left CTC in 2000, I was on my way ‘down south’ on business and arranged to meet him for lunch in Barnet on my way past. This would have been around May of that year, although I am uncertain of the exact date.  I met Steve at his house, my first visit there, prior to us going into town for lunch. Steve was keen to show me some of the sites that he and Jason (the Happy Group) had been working on and I was taken to the apocryphal ‘back bedroom’, which was actually at the front of the house! I recall the sites included a fantasy football site called ‘Half Time Orange’, a party bag retail site, I think called Party Bags, for Jason’s wife, and a fun site called ‘Men in Hats’ featuring Steve’s mate Colin. On the same occasion, Steve also showed me another site he was working on, which he referred to as ‘some silly idea Julie came up with’. I recall this information clearly as I have relayed this story on a number of occasions to friends for obvious reasons. Steve explained that when Julie was pregnant (their first child having been born in January 2000), they had been sitting on the sofa and she had been wondering what some of her school friends were doing, i.e. were they married, did they have children etc, she had suggested setting up a site that allowed you to get in touch with school friends. Steve had been working on it ‘on and off’, as it were, since. I was shown some of things that the site did i.e. the schools database that was on there and the register and search functionality, clearly quite a bit of work had gone into and it was a functioning site (although I must confess to some disinterest at the time as I had no desire to get in touch with anybody I went to school with and I was hungry!). However, Steve asked me to have a go at registering on the site, which I did and became, without realising it, the first ‘official’ member of Friends Reunited.”

This again is one of many friends prepared to provide statements, if required.

The Launch

We purchased the domain www.friendsreunited.co.uk through Aflex and it was registered on 30^th June 2000. 

This FACT is available to the world through the Nominet register, which you can see on the WhoIs database.

Below is an email from Nominet received on 15^th August 2012 that I asked them to confirm the details they had.

“I can confirm that the domain name was registered on 30 June 2000 in the name of Happygroup Limited, company number 3932836, the company changed name at companies house in March 2005 to Friends Reunited Limited and this was updated on our database in August 2009.”

  

From July 2000 the site was officially live.

I also have a very old laptop that has documents mentioning FR around the spring of 2000 all date stamped. I actually created the project as early as Feb 2000 but started coding in May 2000 – all the files are there. Plus we have been reading all the first emails we received from users from July 2000 – its actually been really good fun revisiting some of the first comments by users.

And here’s out first ever-marketing email we sent out to people – dated 24^th July 2000.

FR was one of a few sites we were trying out as well as surviving doing a small consultancy job.

We started in our spare time to try and get people to find the site through various message boards. Registrations started to grow slowly. Over the next six months there was a slow but steady increase as we did more work promoting the site through message boards and as search engines started to pick up on it after a few months. By the end of the year we had just over 7,000 members.

Below is an email from the current Head of FriendsReunited at Bright Solid on 13^th August 2012. [We sold FR in 2005 to ITV who have subsequently sold it onto BrightSolid. We have no formal connection with either ITV or Bright Solid]

“The guys have checked the member table and it shows the following monthly counts from July to December 2000:

Members   Date

114         2000-07-01 00:00:00.000 and 2000-08-01 00:00:00.000

654         2000-08-01 00:00:00.000 and 2000-09-01 00:00:00.000

1222       2000-09-01 00:00:00.000 and 2000-10-01 00:00:00.000

2269       2000-10-01 00:00:00.000 and 2000-11-01 00:00:00.000

1258       2000-11-01 00:00:00.000 and 2000-12-01 00:00:00.000

2131       2000-12-01 00:00:00.000 and 2000-12-31 00:00:00.000”

Just a further point here. Each and every one of these 7,662 registrations will have email addresses attached to them, so whilst a number of them will be defunct, a large number of people could be contacted and prove their registration – not that it will ever be needed. I am sure a lot of them are proud to be early pioneers of the site.

[And just as a further observation to the people who are pursuing us. To collect the above information on registrations took an email, followed by a phone call, and then it was sent to me – all in the space of an hour. Why I ask myself have these people not thought of pursuing these sort of lines of enquiry to prove our story rather than 12 years trying to prove something that didn’t happen ?]

The Hosting Switch

During autumn of 2000 we added more and more features to the site. It was clear that the site actually worked for people and we were onto something. Julie spent a lot of spare time now answering the emails that came in from the site, users asking for help, suggestions and emails of thanks.

One area that we were not happy with was the hosting. The service had intermittent problems of dropping out, and it was a long way from Jason, who lived in Kent, to support when issues arose. Jason was busy doing Happy Party Bags at this time but also was much more technically minded when it came to the servers than me. Therefore we decided to move to a new hosting company – Densitron – based near Jason which turned out to be a cheaper and better service long term.

Below is a statement from a technician from Densitron who helped with the move at the time.

“I know the (approximate) dates very well. You moved to us when we were supposed to open the new data centre (November 2000), but we had delays and didn't open in the end until Feb 2001.

I know this for a fact because I remember helping Jason move your server from our old data centre to our new facility just before you had your first mention on Steve Wright.”

The Re-design

The other area that we clearly also needed to improve was the design. I got a friend who was a graphic designer to knock up a new skin around November 2000 and started the work of improving the site’s functionality, adding lots of new features. These were put live around December 2000.

I am still in touch with our graphic designer and they still have the original PC with all the old and new files on it with relevant date stamps. They were also using the FR site around this time.

2001 and beyond

Registrations were still growing nice and steady.

In January 2001 a journalist from The Net magazine contacted us. He had found the site. He did an interview and photo shoot with Julie back at her old school. 

The feature came out in the March 2001 edition of The Net and here it is.

Also, in January 2001, we were mentioned as website of the day by Miles Mendoza on the Steve Wright show on BBC Radio 2. [I don’t think we need to provide proof of this FACT.]

The effect of this was obvious. It caused a massive spike in our traffic and registrations. As a result of this and continued growth FR went on to become one of the biggest websites in the UK, and the rest is history.

As you can see from the above there is nothing but FACT. This is the 18-month period that we are alleged to have lied about, and continued to cover up. All of these people would happily give testimony under oath – not that it would ever be needed. And there are many others waiting who would also like to give evidence. I also have lots of other evidence that I could use if I had the time or inclination. 

I think this is the END of the matter in terms of FACTUAL information.

You may ask why I haven’t done this before. I helped these people a lot initially, and provided more than ample proof of these facts – this took up my time trying to prove 18 months of my life. I did ask myself why should I waste time on people who never believe anything I say anyway. However after that email and their document were sent and seeing the extent that they went to, I decided enough is enough. 

Of course, I can probably already guess what these peoples’ response to all these FACTS will be. Our friends are all part of the conspiracy of course. The data provided could be back entered or setup by me all those years ago. It’s all a setup, conspiracy and cover up. We bribed Nominet. The file screen shots could be doctored. Blah blah blah.

But one final message to these people - be aware that these statements above are just a tip of the iceberg. There are numerous others who are very keen to give statements and provide further proof of the truth of our story. Any attempt to discredit these statements could have serious consequences. That’s not a threat. It’s FACT.

Coming Next – The FriendsReunited Conspiracy (?) – Part 8 – The Crime

@spankyhurst