I'm surprised that theymos issued warnings about this, I thought the forum doesn't moderate scams or does anything about them.
Folks from Gyft reached out to me and I sent out a newsletter warning people not to use .info.
So,
The 'founder' of .info is 'Thomas Silva'
No prior history in Bitcoin, released a couple press releases. Used some really shady shit to downvote almost all of my social media posts and upvote his own.
Listed this as his phone number: +1 (424) 241-3613
Listed his first address on his press release as 3370 E Pershing Ave, Orlando, Florida, 32806 which was up for rent some time ago, you can get the property owner's info if you look for it, I didn't bother calling and verifying if a Thomas Silva lives there.
The next address he put up was in his newsletters:
Bloomspring Avenue 122
Seattle, Wa 98144
Which just doesn't exist.
Whois is privacy protected, we're sending in a request to namecheap to take down the website.
"Thomas" sent me an email on November 12th:
"Hello Jon,
My name is Thomas Silva and I'm the owner of bitcoinblackfriday.info. I
have seen a hostile reaction from you in some of our posts so I would like
to reach out to you and offer my apologies regarding the similarity
between our two domains and to express my sincere regret that you are
upset with us offering our expertise to help bitcoiners reach the best
bitcoin black friday deals on November 27th. Me and my team have the
utmost respect for you and your website, it has been of great help so far
but please understand that we feel we can do a great job also and we do
not want to compete with your website. We only want to help Bitcoin and
advertise this big day for the greater good of the community and spread
the word as best as possible.
I hope you understand that we do not want to hold grudges and maybe we can
work togheter to make Bitcoin Black Friday as successful as possible.
Sincerely,
Thomas Silva
BitcoinBlackFriday.info
[email protected]"
I have the headers information if someone who's trusted in the community wants to take a look at it and parse out the relevant bits so I don't give out my IP.
I'm mad that this happened, I knew he was shady since people who actually exist aren't that hard to find, but I just thought he was going to sell people's emails or some crap, never expected it to go so bad.
Are you able to post all of the headers and just scrub out your ip address? Just replace all instances of your ip with an xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx