Anyone who happened across THIS thread in Buying & Selling may have noticed a bit of sketchiness afoot... I usually don't ip-check people unless they set off a series of alarms in my head, and this guy managed to trip just about all of them.
  • No feedback or references
  • Disposable/temporary-sounding username
  • "YOU must pay first", defensive
  • Also doesn't help that he's "new". This is something I would only ever discriminate against in a place like Buying & Selling or Everything eBay, due to the very nature of those kinds of forums.
So, I ip-checked him. Here's what I found.

me_good39
IP address for this post
adsl-70-141-6-6.dsl.sgnwmi.sbcglobal.net [ 10 Posts ]

Users posting from this IP address
me_good39 [ 10 Posts ]
NiNtEnDoNuT1983 [ 6 Posts ]
It's not uncommon to find more than one username on a similar ip, especially in regards to the larger ISPs out there. Still, the guy rubbed me the wrong way enough to search for the matching user's more recent posts. Luckily NiNtEnDoNuT1983's last few posts were made in Buying & Selling, so I was able to do just that. Here's what the IP profile looks like.

NiNtEnDoNuT1983
IP address for this post
adsl-70-141-6-6.dsl.sgnwmi.sbcglobal.net [ 6 Posts ]
Now, what we have here is an exact ip match between two different users, both of which having posted today and yesterday with this same ip intermittedly, hours or at times minutes apart. The odds of this now being mere coincedence at this point are pretty much null. They're posting from the same internet connection, which means they're either in the same house, using the same computer, or they're the same person. The connection became even more doubtless when I found something overlooked previously in the thread -- He retroedited it out of his original post after I said something, but he neglected to do the same to the quoted version of that post that he quoted himself on in a later post...

Quote Originally Posted by me_good39
The URL to his perhaps now conveniently broken photobucket image.

So now, let's look at what we have here: two presumably seperate users, now unquestionably connected. Nintendonut is the first to the scene on the thread in question, posting a mere minute after it's created, presumably as a sort of "curious spectator"... this person who is connected to me_good39 who himself offers all kinds of rare and must-have collectors item games out of the blue... this person who has all kinds of positive feedback and a fairly upstanding reputation here at DP, in terms of Buying & Selling anyways... yet mentions nothing indicating a connection, nothing to the effect of "Hey guys, me_good39 is a personal friend, you can trust him!", nothing to vouch whatsoever as to the credibility of this person, nothing to indicate he even knows him at all. In a genuine situation like this, it would make infinitely more sense for someone like Nintendonut, with all kinds of good feedback and references, to sell these rare and especially expensive video game items FOR this guy... or at least vouch as to his credibility... I've moderated Buying & Selling for a good while now, and every case I've ever seen of genuine friend-referred business here happens this way... yet in this case, none of this happens. Do you see what I'm getting at here?

NiNtEnDoNuT1983 was trying to pull a scam-and-burn.

Let me interupt this "Back and to the left..." moment to apologize if this seems like conspiracy theorist-type rambling, but these "6-month scam-and-burn" people really get under my skin. You know, the type who hang around here for about 6 months, leveraging a measure of positive feedback, then utilizing it to line up all kinds of deals in one fell swoop, collecting up on the money, and then splitting town. They take advantage of our peer feedback system to sap hundreds out of game collectors. They're scumbags, pure and simple. I'm not going to hunt these people down, and I'm not going to find their home address or anything like that, but if I can find a way to nip these people in the bud before they get a chance to make off with the loot, I'm damn-well going to do it.

I'm 99.999% convinced that this is the same person. Look at the posting style. Excessive use of exclamation points... they even both make use of an identical bold green type.

It's the same guy.

I think this case actually pisses me off more, as rather than the standard "6-month scam-and-burn", this guy was actually trying to do so WITHOUT needing to blow town. With all of this info now in-hand, I posted a warning in me_good39's thread stating I knew exactly who his ip-shared user was, whereafter he predictably then proceeded to clam up to any offers stating he was "going to ebay", which was the exact intent I had behind posting that. Defused, for the moment. But what happens now?

Well, shortly after all of this blew over, I brought the matter before my fellow moderation and administration staff here, in a message eerily similar to this post(read:verbatim) and asked about what should be done. Those who responded unanimously agreed that a) NiNtEnDoNuT1983/me_good39 should be banned immediately, and b) that I should duplicate my message for everyone else here to read. So, that's just what I'm doing right now.

I think it's safe to say that in the future, anyone caught trying to perform a "scam-and-burn" on DP Members here will subsequently find their situation resembling that more of a "crash-and-burn", at least in regards to their ability to participate in these forums. Myself along with the rest of the DP forum staff will no longer sit by quietly while our fellow DP members, collectors and gamers get sapped of their hard-earned coinage by those who would try to manipulate the way we do things here to screw honest people out of a quick buck.

If you suspect someone here is trying to perform a "scam-and-burn", please contact a moderator or an administrator here first; we ask that you do not post your suspicions in the public forums without having first consulted with us -- that way, upon reaching agreement of convincing evidence, we would be able to back you up in terms of being able to do something about it, with regards to these boards anyway. A member's reputation is important here, and we won't want to sully it without sufficiently convincing evidence that they're trying to scam fellow members. So if you suspect something is up, hold the phones on it for a bit, collect the evidence you need and state your case to a mod or admin. If your evidence is convincing, we'll back you up on it. Thanks.