Complaint Review: The Spamhaus Project - London Internet

I was hired for Spamhaus Project Limited as penetration tester but later I found that my job was to hack ISP and hosting companies email accounts and online billing systems. I refused their offer and decided to expose Spamhaus Project Limited.

If you are supporting The Spamhaus, you are supporting money laundering, tax evasion, bank rolls and white collar criminals. Your organization maybe questioned by the authorities. As some of the well known organizations are paying Spamhaus as services or donations which are mostly sent to the offshore accounts of the Spamhaus group.

During my job with Spamhaus I was able to access some of their organization secrets which I am going to share with you. The purpose of this report is to provide evidence of the deep seated corruption in the Spamhaus project and of its founding members. The creators of spamhaus do not want you to know this information.

First of all there is no "Non profit organization Spamhaus Project Ltd.

Spamhaus is, despite the claims, a very profitable business but completely fraudulent. That its leading team members are involved in many other fraudulent businesses, and that spamhaus is bringing them millions of dollars which they hide in tax-haven countries while cheating the tax systems of others. The reason why spamhaus do not have office and why it's members are hiding is not because they have threats.The reason why spamhaus members are hiding becuase they are involved in multi million dollar tax evasion  and it's offshore money laundering scams. They do not want any tax authoirity to findout about them and that is the reason why they are all hiding.

Basic purpose of Spamhaus is to spread lies and distortions about spam to attract customers. I'll explaint their coercive methods -- some of which are verging on terrorism -- that spamhaus uses to reach their own selfish goals.

Spamhaus is disrupting e-mail exchanges by blacklisting a very large number of providers. Thus forcing people to switch to dirty solutions, and causing more centralization. Spamhaus is also a tool frequently utilized by spammers as it makes it very easy for them to figure out whether or not their e-mails will go through. It also caused the depletion of the IP market when marketing companies (mostly American) purchased entire prefixes for huge money.

Spamhaus bogus companies, nominee/sham directors Spamhaus makes use of nominee and sham directors, this trick is used to create decoys companies to launder funds to tax haven countries, the technique is described here http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/nov/25/offshore-trick-bvi-nominee-director

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2238626/Tens-thousands-bogus-British-companies-run-sham-directors-cheat-tax-millions-aggressive-evasion-practices.html

Originally companies were creating offshores accounts in the the British Virgin Islands and were hard to

track because the main purpose was to hide from the public the relationship between the beneficial owner and the offshore company. Today thanks to site such as companycheck.co.uk it has become pretty easy to fingerprints if a company is involved in this type of business. Today the money laundry usually occurs in the Mauritius or Seychelles were spamhaus has active bank accounts.

One of the easiest way to make sure that a company uses sham directors is to look at the history of directors, a sham director and secretary usually shows has having served for a very short period of time, usually less than a day. Spamhaus built several companies which distinct roles and keep writing everywhere it can to attempt to

distinguish them, this implies writing on every page that mentions them that Spamhaus is nonprofit and not involved in any commercial activities. More interesting is when spamhaus feels obliged to mention that it does not derive incomes from its strategic partners. An important purpose thing for the Spamhaus gangsters is to hide the real beneficial owners. The following shows how shady each registration is.

Spamhaus Technology Limited This is the first related corporation that the spamhaus gang has built up, the history of directors can be found http://companycheck.co.uk/company/05078652/SPAMHAUS-TECHNOLOGY-LIMITED/directors-shareholders

Looking up at the previous directors and secretaries fields you'll see that the two first to have served the

company only lasted 24 hours, "Ms Lesley Joyce Graeme" and "Ms Dorothy May Graeme" having served

about 25 thousands other companies there is no much doubts that they are sham directors.

Spamhaus says that SPAMHAUS TECHNOLOGY LIMITED aka SpamTEQ is the company that markets data produced by the nonprofit organization "The Spamhaus Project". Notice that they constantly attempt to

dissociate the two by always writing that it is nonprofit. The company address is: Communications House, 26 York Street, London, W1U 6PZ. It is very easy to find out that this is the address of w1office http://www.w1office.com/ a company specialized in the incorporation of virtual offices with services such as "Mail forwarding". Another trick that spamhaus uses to stay hidden. The current secretary is Geraldine Myra Peters, this name is important because it is Stephen Linford's girlfriend. She has been involved in the setup of all the other bogus companies.

The Spamhaus Project It is the second registration which is supposed to be for the "nonprofit" organization, it was registered after Spamhaus Technology group. The history of directors can be found here http://companycheck.co.uk/company/05303831/THE-SPAMHAUS-PROJECT/directors-shareholders  Notice the first director and secretary which each served for almost 200 thousands other companies, this huge number shows evidences that the spamhaus gang called for companies specialized in nominee directors and offshore incorporations.

It is interesting to notice that Stephen John Linford (the real name of Steve Linford) is changed in 2010, it is an other trick to prevent the public from easily backtracking history of the individual (this is describe in an other chapter).

The second interesting point is that it shows the offshore company that spamhaus used to evade the tax system and launder money, indeed the second Officer Name in the list is "SPAMHAUS LOGISTICS CORP." a now defunct company that was registered at 1001 Alexander House, 35 Ebene Cybercity in the Mauritius. This is already enough to ask the question: Why would a nonprofit organization needs incorporation in a tax haven? The company is registered at the same address as the SPAMHAUS TECHNOLOGY LIMITED and maintained by the same beneficial owners. Geraldine Myra Peters also shows up has having served for about 4 years between 2004 and 2008.

The Spamhaus Logistic Corp The Spamhaus Logistics Corporation is said to be the logistics and holdings company maintaining the Spamhaus DNS blacklist. It is registered in tax havens, very interesting for a corporation that has no commercial activities The first record can be easily found on British indexes, it is linked to The Spamhaus Project, even though spamhaus wrote that "partner firms are wholly independent and separate legal entities".

It shows the address: 1001 Alexander House, 35 Ebene Cybercity, Mauritius http://companycheck.co.uk/director/913138794 . This is the address of Imara Investing http://www.imara.mu/ a specialist in offshore companies, trusts and fund administration.

A different incorporation is viewable here https://mns-portal.intnet.mu/cbris-name-search/MASTActionServlet?do=FormEdit&id=ViewFormCBRIS.xml&key_1=C070094&key_count=1  . The company is no defunct, most probably because there was a turnover and secret financial operations from the Mauritius were disclosed. It clearly shows that the incorporation was done by Alliance Trust Co.  another company specialized in tax optimization, offshore companies and more.

The Spamhaus Logistic Corp is also present in the Seychelles, 103 Sham Peng Tong Plaza, Victoria, Mahe. It is the address of Apollo Business Solutions (PTY) LTD http://apollo.sc/ , as usual a company specialized in tax optimization.

The Spamhaus Logistic Corp is said to be a IBC (International Business Company), a tax-free corporation.

On this page http://apollo.sc/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=107&Itemid=371, apollo.sc says that IBC are good alternatives to the British Virgin Islands incorporation where bogus British corporations usually put their financials.

Fake Organisation Addresses

Spamhaus uses tricks to lure people into thinking that it operates from one country while it operates from

another.One of them is on the contact page (http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/section/Organization), the British address is nothing else put the address of w1office, the company that was used to register The Spamhaus project and Spamhaus Technology Limited which provides a mail forwarding service.

There is NO Spamhaus in SWITZERLAND The second address in Switzerland is the address of a business center, there is absolutely no spamhaus officesin the building but as usual a mail forwarding company. This trick is very efficient against lawsuits, indeed when British authorities lookup for spamhaus they get lured into thinking that it is a Swiss company while there is absolutely no registration of Spamhaus in Switzerland.

The Spamhaus Whitelist Company is fake

The Spamhaus Whitelist is probably one of the worst of its kind, the main goal of this project is to become

the entity which would regulate mail exchanges. Beside on the organization page (http://www.spamhauswhitelist.com/en/organization/index.html) they say that it is a privately held company

based in St Helier, Jersey (Great Britain), once again the first question is why would spamhaus setup once again a company in a tax haven. However the most interesting is probably that this company does not exist at all, when queried the register of business of Jersey returns nothing, However the address PO Box 532, Green Street, St Helier JE4 5UW returns The Channel House Trustees, a now defunct company specialized in the provision of trustee and corporate services (aka tax evasion).

Propaganda

Spamhaus over all is about propaganda, over the years spamhaus has attempted to convince that SPAM was a huge problem that it could destroy the Internet.

Because of its business nature, the spamhaus always adapt to situation and finds new lies, they will always avoid direct communications, Stephen Linford will for instance never accept a direct interview because he knows that he could be asked disturbing questions.

The Spamhaus always have a very high esteem of themselves, they often tell that without them the Internet would be broken.

Back in times blacklists of this type had bad reputations, they were commonly used to coerce and extort

people but Spamhaus was different, it was free and Linford was answering to telephone calls to quickly

resolve matters he was also providing his address. This resulted in Spamhaus having a good reputation. But when spamhaus figured out how to make money they slowly but surely removed contact information, built up traps and money laundering schemes and started to coerce people.

If someone starts to write to critize spamhaus negatively, this person will be immediately put under the flag of spammer or "cybercrminal", the spamhaus gang can even go as far as opening blogs to call someone a pedophile and rapist.Spamhaus will also always pretend that it never had any problem with the authorities, but it always escaped because it made it hard to attack by luring people. When spamhaus receives threats from big companies who have money to pay lawyers, spamhaus will usually comply. However when it understands that the target has no chance to cause legal troubles it would not hesitate to blacklist it as much as they can. Spamhaus has no relationship with the authorities, but it tries to pretend to do good to avoid any potential investigation.

Spamhaus techniques consist of calling the opposition the bad people, because Spamhaus is big, journalists will listen to spamhaus and copy everything they say without further investigation.

Spamhaus constantly plays the victim, when its site had been under Denial of Services attacks it put all the contributors of the stophaus.com forums under the same flag calling it a collective of spammer and

cybercriminals. Spamhaus attacked a dutch hosting company by censoring its network then ISP of its ISP, threatening each of them of getting blacklisted if they would not break the link.

Spamhaus hacking and sniffing? Some of the spamhaus members like Rob Schultz is well known hackers and they are using almost the same software which are used by the government to snoop on its citizens.  They not only read the emails but also hack the online billing systems to check the ip and its user details. Sometimes when spamhaus just list the ip without any proof it means they have hacked the email accounts of the ip block owner including their billing system. From the billing system they have traced the actual ip owner. 

How to get your listing removed? Police , tax authorities and court cases are the matters which Spamhaus do not ever wish to get into. Sometimes when they were blackmailing some hosting companies and ISP by blacklisting their ip addresses it  actually backfired. Few ISP, Hosting companies and domain registrar when contacted the police against spamhaus their listings were immediately removed by the spamhaus. If you want to get your listing removed then immediately contact police, tax departments and lawyers. Contact police in your country, tax department in UK, tax department in France, tax department in Andorra, lawyer in your country or in the UK.

Stephen John Linford will never go to any police station, any court or any tax department because it will collapose the entire system made by him. You can also contact www.ico.org.uk with your complaint and proof. If ICO UK do not entertain your complaint then you may approach EU Data protetion office in EU at www.europarl.europa.eu

Spamhaus blackmails ISP and their upstreams Blackmailing is the only tool which spamhaus use against ISP. Only tier2, tier3, tier4 ISP and hosting companies are the their target. Spamhaus first blackmail the hosting company if they ignore spamhaus then they start blackmailing their upstreams. If the upstream also ignores then they blacklist the mailserver of the upstream. When ISP face problem in delivering emails to their clients  they are forced to give up on the Spamhaus demands. What ISP and hosting companies do not know that spamhaus has already hacked into their online portal and snooping their emails conversations. Blackmailing tactics are only applicable up to tier2 ISP. Spamhaus knows this very well the day they will blackmail Tier1 that will be the Spamhaus Doomsday

Wikipedia vandalism

The wikipedia articles about spamhaus and Stephen (Steve) Linford are incredibly positive, this is because spamhaus (usually Stephen Linford himself) edits the pages to remove contents. Stephen Linford removed information and added glorifying lines several times. There is a talk page about the Spamhaus article on wikipedia here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Spamhaus_Project. The page shows numerous complains of editors having had their contributions removed. The most blattant proof can be seen here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Spamhaus_Project#Controversial_section_removed_by_Spamhaus_employee where the editor shows that the IP address which was used to edit the article was from a leased IP space which clearly had "SPAMHAUS" in the whois. The article points to a page which explains how Spamhaus had extorted a hosting company.

This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Spamhaus_Project#Response_by_Spamhaus is an interesting entry, notice "As one of the Spamhaus team", this is actually Stephen Linford himself. The IP 91.187.82.121 whois shows Andorra la Vella and is the IP of the router of the hotel where Stephen Linford and his girlfriend Geraldine Peters spend couple of days to reset the numbers of days they have spent in France to fraud the French tax system and avoid being considered as resident of the country.

Stephen Linford also edits http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Linford. The history shows changes made by

193.115.218.120, the changes made from that IP address consisted of removing every bad aspect of Linford's life and adding extremely glorifying paragraphs. With the use of search engine we can find out that it was Stephen Linford's IP, from this link https://mail.tffenterprises.com:8100/Lists/cgpsa-discuss/Message/2242-H.txt you can see that [email protected] (uxn.com was an other fraudulent company from the Linfords) sent an e-mail to [email protected].

Later, Linford edited wikipedia using the user name "FirenzeNove"

Characters

Stephen (Steve) John Linford

Full name: Stephen John Linford

Nickname: Steve

Passport: 706840870

Place of Birth: London

Nationality: British

Date of Birth: 12 December 1956

Residence: 1087 Avenue de la Colle-sur-Loup, 06480 La Colle-sur-Loup, France

He's the main character in the whole story, originally Linford dumped a photography school and started to

live in a motorhouse playing the guitar. His precarious situation has then changed a lot since then, Linford spends a lot of time trying to remove evidences of his sudden lifestyle changes such as editing wikipedia articles, claiming to be a honest person on every article talking about him and Spamhaus etc. Linford will also always use his nickname "Steve" to mix up records lookup.  When the Internet became more and more available to residents Linford attempted to build several companies. Each of them was a failure and built the same way Spamhaus has been built, nominee directors, tax evasion...

The first record shows ownership of "Ulra Design Limited", a hosting company that failed and got dissolved but which Linford still pretends to operate under fake registration in Luxembourg and Andorra.

Quickly later, Linford makes DUKEWOOD DESIGNS LIMITED using nominee/sham directors which can

be found here http://companycheck.co.uk/company/02388756/DUKESWOOD-DESIGNS-LIMITED/directors-shareholders. A first demonstration of fraud.

Geraldine Myra Peters

Full name: Geraldine Myra Peters

Nationality: British

Date of Birth: 28 May 1947

Place of Birth: Yangon (Burma)

Passport:

She's Stephen Linford's girlfriend. She has been involved in many of the frauds scheme that the Spamhaus team has built.

She can be found has having served for Ultradesign Limited, Spamhaus Technology Limited, The Spamhaus Project, Ultra Design Limited. Can be checked here http://companycheck.co.uk/director/902508000/MS-GERALDINE-MYRA-PETERS.

She is also involved in the creation of the real estate company in France which together with Stephen Linford they used to purchase the villa in La Colle-sur-loup and defraud the French tax system.

Richard Cox

Cox is the alleged CIO of Spamhaus since 2004. Interesting enough as it is just before Spamhaus started to request money to access its blacklists.

Cox on this page http://www.go-op.coop/people/bios/ says that he is the director of two companies, "The Phone Coop" and "Energy-saving

Coop".The Phone Coop business information can be found http://companycheck.co.uk/company/IP28965R/PHONE-CO-OP-LIMITED. No information about this company can be found, no accounts filled...

Energy-saving Coop can be found here http://companycheck.co.uk/company/08799874/THE-ENERGY-SAVING-CO-OP-LTD. The status shows that no director is appointed, in the history we can find a previous director "Mr Peter Valaitis", another sham director who has served more than 12513 othercompanies...

Cox tried to turn the RIPE NCC into a sort of gestapo. He was expelled because he failed to attempt a lot of meeting but also because of his unproductive and deprecated views. The vote to expell him was unanimous.

How much does Spamhaus make or how much tax does spamhaus evades every year?

Spamhaus Project LTD which is non profit organization actually makes millions every year. They sell their serviecs from http://www.spamhaustech.com/datafeed/pricecalculator.lasso

If the basic services are purchased for 1 Million users

RSync service for IP data

RSync service for Domain Name data

Price for Internet Service Provider with 1000000 users

The price Per year    $45,000

Cost per user per year = $0.0450 (based on 1,000,000 users). Prices are in US Dollars

Spamhaus sells it services to   

  outlook.com ~ 420 millions users with the revenue of  18 Million

  yahoo.com ~ 281 millionswith the revenue of 9.81 Million

  aol.com ~ 24 millions with the revenue of  1.08 Million

  gmx.com ~ 10 millions with the revenue of  450,000

The income from  just these companies is 29.34 Millions

There are hundreds of more companies which buy spamhaus services.

If you look at http://companycheck.co.uk/search/results?SearchCompaniesForm[name]=spamhaus&yt3=

The Cash is 0

Asset is 0

Net worth is 0

Liabilities are 0

There is one more company Spamhaus Technology in UK which is just an eye washer for the UK revenue & Customs in which Spamhaus accept money to show their legal presence in UK

http://companycheck.co.uk/company/05078652/SPAMHAUS-TECHNOLOGY-LIMITED

The cash £1,382,387

Net Worth £498,515

Assets £1,432,650

Liabilites £584,995

The cash is $2.3 million only.

Spamhaus takes small payments in UK company bank account and rest is sent to the offshore accounts of Seychelles, Mauritius.

For this scheme they have appointed companies with whom they share profit. Spamhaus is operated by white collar criminals who are expert in doing financial frauds. They do not take money directly in their account but via these companies. These companies takes some fee and transfer funds to the Spamhaus.

Security Zones United Kingdom www.securityzones.net

Mxtools Canda www.mxtools.com

RAS Reputation Administration Service Ptd. Ltd www.ras-asia.com

Bigger corporates pays directly to the spamhaus. Some pay as services and some use the word donation to avoid taxes. It is highly  suspected that Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo and Gmx directors and employees gets kick back in their offshore accounts from the Spamhaus. Say Microsoft paid 10 Million to The Spamhaus in return spamhaus will transfer some funds to the Microsoft directors and employees offshore accounts.

Some of the UK police staff is also bribed by the spamhaus for giving tips about any complaint comes against The Spamhaus. In return Spamhaus send gifts and sometimes cash to the UK police. This is one of the reason why UK police has never registered any case against Spamhaus.

How Spamhaus withdraw funds from Offshore accounts and purchase assets bypassing tax?

As per the immigration law if you reside in any country for over 183 days then you are entitled to pay tax in that country. Any income and assets purchased or sold needs to be declared to the tax deparment of the residing country. But Stephen John Linford and his partner Geraldine Myra Peters have found unusual way to avoid taxation in all the countries. Most of the time they are living in their villa in france and for couple of days they go to Andorra lives in hotel and come back. And sometimes they go to Spain just to eye wash the immigration and tax authorities. Best example is when they both declared resident of the hotel room in Andorra during purchase of villa in the France.

Stephen Linford and Geraldine Peters villa in france

Stephen John Linford and Geraldine Myra Peters are the owner of a villa in France. The address is 1087 Avenue de la Colle-sur-Loup, 06480 La Colle-sur-Loup, France. The villa (which was known as VILLA L'AGACHOUN) was purchased on the 26th of October 2010 for 2.1 millions euros.

In order to evade taxes, Stephen Linford and Geraldine Peters have registered a SCI (Société civile immobilière) company, this type of company is almost only used for tax advantages. By opening the company and purchasing the villa through the purchase of the previous owner's company (also SCI), Stephen Linford and Geraldine Peters become the two owners of the property. Finally, to totally escape taxes the two testify to live and be resident of (hotel room) Andorra, therefore not liable to the French tax system.

The villa is also the place from where Stephen Linford operates spamhaus.

Acquisition of the villa

The first page of the declaration (with names, date of birth, nationality and fake residential addresses) http://postimg.org/image/z9w9kts6x/

In October 2010, Stephen Linford and Geraldine Peters registered a company in Antibes, near by their future residence. The process consists of creating a Société Civile Immobilière (Real Estate Company), this type of company is used for diverse reasons but most notably to benefit of tax advantages and to facilitate sale of properties.

The original owners of the villa had beforehand created the same type of company which facilitated the process of change of ownership.

Stephen Linford and Geraldine Peters both declared to be resident of Andorra (in a hotel) in order to be totally nontaxable by the French system, to accomplish that they called for an Andorran notary to testify.

It is very interesting to notice that the document stipulate that the villa is in "Avenue de la Colle", while in reality it is in "Avenue de la Colle-sur-loup" which is different but in the same city.

On the 26th of October 2010, Stephen Linford and Geraldine Peters signed the document and paid.

Characteristics

The villa is called "VILLA L'AGACHOUN" from the name of previous owners who had built it.

    Address: 1087 Avenue de la Colle-sur-Loup, 06480 La Colle-sur-loup, France.

    Surface: 3540m2

It contains:

        On the ground floor: lounge, lunch room, a kitchen, a laundry, water closet, a bedroom with bath and dressing.

        On the first floor: two bedrooms, a bathroom, a terrace.

        Outdoor: a carport, a swimming pool, a technical closet (for the swimming pool), and a surrounding garden.

Stephen John Linford modifies his Wikipedia Article

Stephen Linford has been editing his own wikipedia page to remove negative and non-glorious statements. Please see https://91.220.163.134/scamhaus/wiki/index.php?title=Stephen_Linford_modifies_his_wikipedia_article Stephen Linford modifies his wikipedia article.

He also used the username "FirenzeNove" to edit both the article about him and spamhaus. Please see https://91.220.163.134/scamhaus/wiki/index.php?title=Stephen_Linford_edits_the_Spamhaus_wikipedia_entry Stephen Linford edits the Spamhaus wikipedia entry.

The Spamhaus gang is very experienced in misleading people, they are doing this for over 20 years. Please read other articles in the propaganda category to understand how they carefully manipulate people.

First Suspicions

After having read the wiki article, I found out that it was very positively oriented and that it was even a show off at some points, it seemed very obvious that Stephen Linford had himself contributed to the article, therefore we've looked at the history and discovered interesting edits.

2004

First appearance of an article about Steve Linford.

25 January

The first article on Steve Linford appeared, nothing interesting was written except a non-serious sentence. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Steve_Linford&oldid=2226776

The same day an wikipedia administrator flag the article as "stub"

10 February

"AlexPlank", an active wikipedia editor starts to edit the article. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Steve_Linford&oldid=2359859

The article is mostly made of the "Spammers Can Run but They Can't Hide" article of Saul Hansell for the The New York Times.

14 February

A non-registered user starts to edit the article from the IP: 193.115.218.120. Non-glorious paragraph are suddenly modified.

"After dropping out of photography school, Steve purchased a a motor home, parked it on beaches and made his living by playing guitar in coffee shops" becomes "After dropping out of photography school, Steve made his living writing music and eventually moved into concert production".

"Linford served as their road manager" to "Linford served as their production manager".

The statement about his music company and its failure is removed.

The paragraph about spamhaus is changed, it now glorifies spamhaus of being used by "The world's largest Internet providers".

Quick investigation revealing Stephen as the editor

The 14 February 2004 modification was so blatant that it seemed obvious that the correction were made by one of the spamhaus gangsters.

In order to prove that, we first made a whois of the IPv4 address, 193.115.218.120. It eventually returned nothing interesting but that the IP belonged to a block allocated to a British ISP.

The next step simply consisted to search the IP on google.com, https://www.google.com/#q=%22193.115.218.120%22 The second result's title "Return-Path: <[email protected]>"... https://mail.tffenterprises.com:8100/Lists/cgpsa-discuss/Message/2242-H.txt

The page shows the header of an e-mail sent by Stephen Linford, we discover that the IP 193.115.218.120 was used for the ultradesign SMTP...

To conclude, Stephen Linford has edited the article...

Later, edits of the same kind were been made by an user "FirenzeNove".

The edits consists of removing/editing negative paragraphs to insert positive ones.

"Firenze" and "Nove" are Italian words, knowing that Stephen spent a long time in Italy, that the user has only contributed to the articles about spamhaus and stephen and that contribs are extremely glorifying, there's no much doubt that this is him, he even posted a picture that he uploaded of himself in his villa. The user became flagged as being involved in a wiki edit war.

"FirenzeNove" also massively modified the page about spamhaus, please see the related article about propaganda on the spamhaus wikipedia article.

StepeheStephen John Linford modifies his Wikipedia Article

The Spamhaus gang is very experienced in misleading people, they are doing this for over 20 years. Please read other articles in the propaganda category to understand how they carefully manipulate people.

First Suspicions

After having read the wiki article, I found out that it was very positively oriented and that it was even a show off at some points, it seemed very obvious that Stephen Linford had himself contributed to the article, therefore we've looked at the history and discovered interesting edits.

2004

First appearance of an article about Steve Linford.

25 January

The first article on Steve Linford appeared, nothing interesting was written except a non-serious sentence. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Steve_Linford&oldid=2226776

The same day an wikipedia administrator flag the article as "stub"

10 February

"AlexPlank", an active wikipedia editor starts to edit the article. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Steve_Linford&oldid=2359859

The article is mostly made of the "Spammers Can Run but They Can't Hide" article of Saul Hansell for the The New York Times.

14 February

A non-registered user starts to edit the article from the IP: 193.115.218.120. Non-glorious paragraph are suddenly modified.

"After dropping out of photography school, Steve purchased a a motor home, parked it on beaches and made his living by playing guitar in coffee shops" becomes "After dropping out of photography school, Steve made his living writing music and eventually moved into concert production".

"Linford served as their road manager" to "Linford served as their production manager".

The statement about his music company and its failure is removed.

The paragraph about spamhaus is changed, it now glorifies spamhaus of being used by "The world's largest Internet providers".

Quick investigation revealing Stephen as the editor

The 14 February 2004 modification was so blatant that it seemed obvious that the correction were made by one of the spamhaus gangsters.

In order to prove that, we first made a whois of the IPv4 address, 193.115.218.120. It eventually returned nothing interesting but that the IP belonged to a block allocated to a British ISP.

The next step simply consisted to search the IP on google.com, https://www.google.com/#q=%22193.115.218.120%22 The second result's title "Return-Path: <[email protected]>"... https://mail.tffenterprises.com:8100/Lists/cgpsa-discuss/Message/2242-H.txt

The page shows the header of an e-mail sent by Stephen Linford, we discover that the IP 193.115.218.120 was used for the ultradesign SMTP...

To conclude, Stephen Linford has edited the article...

Later, edits of the same kind were been made by an user "FirenzeNove".

The edits consists of removing/editing negative paragraphs to insert positive ones.

"Firenze" and "Nove" are Italian words, knowing that Stephen spent a long time in Italy, that the user has only contributed to the articles about spamhaus and stephen and that contribs are extremely glorifying, there's no much doubt that this is him, he even posted a picture that he uploaded of himself in his villa. The user became flagged as being involved in a wiki edit war.

"FirenzeNove" also massively modified the page about spamhaus, please see the related article about propaganda on the spamhaus wikipedia article.

http://www.pure360.com/blog/blog-entries/The-worst-black-list-to-be-on

http://linux.andreagozzi.com/content/spamhaus_article.php

http://www.jetcafe.org/dave/usenet/dheditorial6.html