You see that red "Do NOT tell your scammer..." text?

[Wayne]

Let me tell you the story behind it.

It was 10 years ago to the day when this happened. First a little bit of backstory to explain this. We don't want scammers to know our real identities, so we all use fake names. One of the other things we do is use privacy protection (which we'll call PP). It basically hides my real details if you look up who owns the site. I can still be contacted, but it's done via the PP company, who forward it to my personal email address. Now, on with the story.

Someone joined our forum, told the scammer his details were on our forum and then told us he'd done it. This is a very big no-no and is one of our forum rules. If a scammer finds himself here there's typically one of two things he'll do. He'll threaten the person who posted the information if they can work out who it was, or he'll try to threaten us. To stop people being bullied by their scammer into removing their posts we have a system in place where only admins can alter or delete a post after a set amount of time. That way the scammer has to come to us to try and get it removed and we know exactly how to handle scammers. Anyways, this guy told the scammer he was posted here and was told in no uncertain terms that was a breach of the forum rules. "Freedom of speech" was his argument, to which I told him it doesn't work that way after mocking him for trying to pull that shit here. Then he got himself banned. This is where the fun really starts.

A few days later I received an email forwarded from PP. Guess who it was from. No, it wasn't from Santa, though I did feel like all my Christmases had come at once when I read it. It was from bozo, writing to the site owner complaining about the "cruel and sarcastic" admin on the forum and demanding I sack him. If he thought I was "cruel and sarcastic" before, boy was he in for a treat! I wish I still had my reply, but it's long been lost to time. Take my word for it though, it started with my claiming horror that he had been treated so badly and promising him I would indeed sack the offending admin, before revealing that I WAS that very admin!! I mean, it even says in my profile that I'm the site owner. Oddly enough this nugget of information stopped him in his tracks and I never heard from him again.

This is why we have that red writing at the top of every page, plus the reason it says "cruel and sarcastic admin" in my profile. And now you know.