The FriendsReunited Conspiracy (?) – Part 14 – Our Technical Team (?)

If you haven’t been reading this series of blogs then catch up at http://spankyrant.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-friendsreunited-conspiracy-part-1.html and the 13 following parts.

I was going to stop writing about this but every time I start to get bored then these people do or send something else that just is so ridiculous that I have to tap away again.

However, it seems after all my blogs, all that proof, our pursuers are still going strong. Still contacting people to try and feed their conspiracy.

I met someone recently who had been contacted by them. Mike was the owner of the hosting company Densitron whom we moved to in early 2001. He had been contacted by our chief pursuer. After corresponding with him for a while, Mike shared relevant information in order to help establish the correct facts and timeline.

This is how the correspondence went.

In mid November, our chief pursuer emailed Mike for the first time. The email address was that of a secondary school in Kent – including all the school footers you would expect from an official email address.

He wrote -

“I am a secondary school teacher who has been carrying out some important Internet research”

He then explained he was

“trying really hard to reconcile the actual launch protocol surrounding the site” (FR)

(I just love that “launch protocol” phrase– never heard a startup launch called that – sounds like something out of 24 – sorry, I digress)

Mike then explains, like everyone, that he cannot remember the exact dates and details.

Our pursuer comes back with

“My research counters the formal party line of a 30th June 2000 launch by Aflex (a company that told me they never hosted the site).”

Again – loving the “party line bit.” And just for the millionth time, Aflex first hosted FR back in summer 2000.

And then he wrote -

“Depending on the evidence you find, it could lead to a sizeable financial reward for your trouble”

Mike declined the financial offer but wondered if this person was interested in a business Mike was involved with (concerning school CVs). Our pursuer replied

“although I teach Business Studies, as a humble teacher the decision to purchase would not be mine”

Let’s just stop for a second. This is the same person who told us repeatedly that he had moved abroad. Yet now here he is saying he is a teacher, and using a Kent school’s email address. So is he working at that school in Kent or gone abroad ?

A discreet enquiry suggests that he hasn’t been at that school since the summer.

In any case, whether or not he is still on their books, I suspect the school would be very interested to know he is using a school email address to offer “sizeable financial reward” for information on his own personal project. We are aware of 2 other addresses that he has used recently, so why use this school one ?  Hmm ?

Mike was then sent a summary of our pursuer’s “investigation”. Mike tells him its “interesting but confusing reading”. He explains the history of Densitron and corrects him on the following statement made by an “experienced fraud squad officer”:

“…from intelligence received, we have discovered 100% that the domain name was changed to Happy Group Ltd in December 2000, not 30.6.00 as appears on the domain name search.  Furthermore, 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.” 

Chorver did not exist until 2003 so invoices from them were impossible in 2001. I also corrected this recently in my own blogs. That experienced officer can’t be that experienced then?

Our pursuer continues with:

“They definitely did not launch the site in July 2000 as they stated.“

So still ignoring all the hard evidence I produced, and

“Aside from some people lying, sadly I have no evidence of any wrongdoing yet, just suspicions and honest grounds for continued investigation.”

So an admission just weeks ago that after 12 years that they “no evidence of wrongdoing”  and of course we are still “lying”.

Hold on one moment. Can you imagine taking someone to court and in your prosecution evidence stating “I have found no evidence of wrongdoing”. This is so unbelievable I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Give Up Man. Get On With Your Life. Enjoy Your Children. Read A Book. Take Up Gardening. Go On Holiday In The Seychelles. But Please Stop This Now.

Oh well, none of that is going to happen so back to reality and the most recent round of communications.

In an email, our chief pursuer sneaks in a PS asking Mike whether he knows the developer (you remember – the one who is supposed to have given us the idea for FR) with no explanation to why he is asking. Cheeky. Mike of course doesn’t know him – like the rest of us.

Our pursuers then start to talk about the possibility that Aflex maybe bought the domain in June 2000 and just had a splash page for 6 months before we took it over. Again, they seemed to have ignored my “Facts” blog – so those 7,000 registered users I talked about are made up, then?

Mike explains that a hosting company would not cyber squat on a domain. Lets think – do you really think the domain FriendsReunited was a valuable domain back in mid 2000? Of course not – in fact we always thought it was pretty poor ourselves, and constantly had plans to change it in the early days, until it got popular and stuck.

Our pursuer then states

“I have 1,000 pages of research notes, e-mails, letters, meeting notes etc.”

Again I am gob smacked. In previous communications he suggested over a hundred pages of notes but 1,000 is just ridiculous.

Then a few days later Mike is sent the full summary. There are dozens, if not hundreds of differences from the document that we had been sent. I haven’t had a chance to go through them all yet – and I’m not sure I can be bothered, really. Dates are changed and lots of areas have been rewritten.

However a few damning things come out immediately.

Firstly, the statement from their “fraud squad officer” has changed. It now reads -

“…from intelligence received, we have discovered 100% that the domain name was changed to Happy Group Ltd in December 2000, not 30.6.00 as appears on the domain name search.  Furthermore, we can confirm that they sent their first invoice to Happy Group in January 2001. This will not doubt be recorded in the official documentation and would be impossible to change.”

It’s been changed to correct the mistaken reference to Chorver (who, you may recall, didn’t exist at the date referred to). Now, sorry, correct me if I am wrong, and not knowing the legalities of it, but, surely YOU CAN’T CHANGE A STATEMENT BY A THIRD PARTY (MADE 8 YEARS AGO) !  And by a police officer ! Just to fit your purposes !

But hang on – The Who’s Who in the document I was sent by our pursuers says that the person making the above statement is a Fraud Squad Officer. However, in the one sent to Mike he is now listed as a

London based Private Investigator working for [our pursuers] in 2004

Which exactly is he? Am I the only one shocked by this? You cannot get away with what you are trying to do.

[*** Quick Update – a third version of this document has now been sent to the press and I have seen it. And unbelievably this statement has changed again:

“...from intelligence received, we have discovered 100% that the domain name was changed to Happy Group Ltd in December 2000, not 30.6.00 as appears on the domain name search. Furthermore, we can confirm that Densitron sent their first invoice to Happy Group in January 2001. This will not doubt be recorded in Chorvers official documentation and would   be   impossible   to   change.”

And the serious fraud squad officer is no longer listed by name, but the document indicates that this statement is made by “an experienced detective (a Fraud Squad Officer)”

Well who is this guy – an experienced fraud squad officer or not.

All very strange ***]

And secondly, in the document I was sent it talks very briefly about following someone. In the version sent to Mike, there is a new section talking about following the same person which states

“this was the only car journey he made all month outside of central London.”

This is worse than I ever thought – they really followed someone for a MONTH. I’m going to have to write about this separately. Outrageous.

Back to Mike and our chief pursuer. Mike tells me he tried to remain neutral, but thought their document was very strange. Details of the Nominet registration of the FR domain was enough proof for Mike. He told our pursuers that their document was “too complex and a little rambling” (that really is polite) – but, apparently with a view to giving them some positive feedback, Mike mentioned a “surprising number of coincidences that give good grounds for suspicion”. Fair enough: there are a number of coincidences and non-coincidences (each of which our pursuers make great play of), as I have previously mentioned in my blog.  But coincidences are everywhere.  In fact, it’s pretty surprising there aren’t more of them.  [As the Wikipedia entry on coincidence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coincidence) points out: “From a statistical perspective, coincidences are inevitable and often less remarkable than they may appear intuitively.”  You can say that again.]

What is brilliant, though, is that within 4 days of his email this statement by Mike appears in our pursuer’s post on my blog – and it is stated as coming from “one of your [ie, my/FR’s] own technical team”. How funny.  Mike thought so too – I think that just about sums them up! Our chief pursuer communicates with someone he doesn’t even know (Mike), and then attributes Mike’s words - completely out of context – to the FR team.

Mike also suggests they contact Nominet. We know they have already done that repeatedly.

Our chief pursuer replies stating he doesn’t “want to be fobbed off by more rubbish or lies” and that “They have been most unhelpful on the phone, back in 2001 to 2004 they gave out the wrong information to us anyway” – serious allegations against a respected organization. Of course it must be wrong if it doesn’t fit into your mooted conspiracy.

Apparently they “have a solicitor writing again now”, and amazingly “other avenues are being pursued and we are also writing a legal letter to Face Book to release key information that was recently deleted.”

I haven’t the foggiest what they are now on about with regards to Facebook, but then we shouldn’t really be surprised anymore by any of this. Why would Facebook have “key information”? Madness.

This all happened over late November/early December. Amazing that they are still going strong. And a bit naughty that they are sending out that document to anyone: it continues to include false and deeply unpleasant innuendo about me, amongst other things.

To finish off his communication with our chief pursuer, Mike wrote to him on 21^st December to say he had met me and compared relevant notes. Mike has now asked him to stop communicating with him - and I fully expect Mike to now become a player in their whole mooted conspiracy.  Congratulations, Mike!