(or how I was threatened and harassed by at least one and probably more people who seemingly have a grudge against my dad jokes….)
As you’ll know, I received some threatening messages on Christmas Eve, as well as some abuse on my LinkedIn profile on that day by a lovely (anonymous) chap called “Mark O.”, so let’s just use that from now: { “alleged-name”: “Mark O.” }.
IYKYK.
Here’s a lovely example of this abuse:
We all know that this { “alleged-name”: “Mark O.” } is merely a Json encoded version of who it really was, right?
I wanted to take the chance to post a little critique of what they’re all about, and put the record straight.
Incidentally, the views expressed in this post are my own, only, and do not represent the views of any employers past or present.
The subject matter, sadly, is pretty serious – there were some serious allegations made about me and very clear attempts to harass me with incomplete and inaccurate data to boot.
There has been a fairly long track record of this sort of online harassment, alongside verbal abuse too. This isn’t any kind of isolated incident, unfortunately.
That said, I’m going to be both pretty derisive of { “alleged-name”: “Mark O.” } and their efforts and attempt to present this in a light and slightly sarcastic way, so please read on!
WHATS THE BACKGROUND, FELLA?
The background? Well, let’s just say that they’re a little aggrieved.
{ “alleged-name”: “Mark O.” } had lost their little cash cow.
I should mention, though, that I have tremendous sympathy for the vast majority of my ex-colleagues who lost their jobs through no fault of their own, incidentally.
From my side, I was just glad that Champion were so willing to egregiously break employment law, I got very, very lucky and was fortunate to leave many years ago before their license got cancelled. (I didn’t feel lucky at the time, right enough: the whole experience was awful from start to finish, but hey ho – I’m still here!)
Really, though – { “alleged-name”: “Mark O.” } really ought to be focussing their considerable ire on these guys and their bosses :-
The first photo above is Yanhao (Kevin) Zhu, who’d worked a long time with “Bill Morgan” (second photo) in “fintech”. He was a director of Champion Tech for a long time, and was the “boss” of the Isle of Man operation also for a long time.
The second photo is “Bill Morgan” aka Lingfei Liang, the UBO of King Gaming and the other companies, including Champion Tech and Manx Internet Commerce.
The teams mentioned in the judgement below were located on the island at the old RBS offices (Howard Pearson House), according to the BBC and other sources :-
Of course, this little beauty might also have something to do with it too:
If you’re interested, it’s the Chinese judgement naming King and Manx Internet Commerce that according to the BBC, sparked the investigation into them.
The ICYMI was that three ex-employees of Manx Internet Commerce pleaded guilty to being part of teams that defrauded Chinese Citizens out of millions of pounds, and the Ultimate Beneficial Owner of King was also mentioned by name in this document as the ring leader. They were based on the Isle of Man, and according again to the BBC, worked out of the old RBS offices, above, as well as a local hotel.
SO – WHAT THE HECK?
So, after I challenged { “alleged-name”: “Mark O.” } on linked in – they decided to “up their game” and post their document up on a document sharing website. As you’ll see later, the very definition of “upping their game” is certainly very much subjective.
The document was actually almost certainly stolen from Champion Tech, for the avoidance of doubt – purely because I can’t imagine that the report’s original authors were 100% keen to publish it, given how crappy and inaccurate it was.
It was about as forensic as Mr Magoo. And not anywhere near as engaging, truth be told.
However, I digress – let’s fast forward a little in time – and let’s examine this document in a little more detail. Get your popcorn ready!
This report was produced by a local trust company who appeared to have a “forensics” department, and was produced for their client, who were scrabbling around for a way to threaten anyone who’d even looked at them in the wrong way, including yours truly.
This document was never publicly published, but I’d seen snippets of it in a threatening lawyers’ letter that they sent me in early 2023. All I can say about the full document (or indeed the lawyer’s letter) is that they had some words in them, and that they were apparently documents, and that’s about it!
Here’s a small sample (edited for brevity, but it shows the kinds of stuff that was written) :-
WHAT ABOUT THE DOC, FELLA?
Okay, since you asked – below is the web archive of the doc (I had the original deleted by the document sharing site, incidentally – I’m really very sorry about that!)
(I edited out the company name, really so they won’t get any more annoyed that their work saw the light of day, honestly, it’s embarrassingly poor) :-
As you can see, it’s clearly titled to try to be top of Google whenever anyone types my name in association with my previous employers / Isle of Man.
I love the alternative spelling they’ve used too. Hilarious!
You don’t need to be a genius to work out their intentions here, right?
First of all, let’s get a flavour of what {“alleged-name”: “Mark O.” } was all about :-
As you can see, { “alleged-name”: “Mark O.” } clearly wasn’t someone who you’d describe as evil genius material. I mean, University of Oxford? University of No-Brains, more like!
Don’t bother searching for his profile, he deleted it. That’s because he’s so clever, and possibly an evil genius.
[ He’s probably got an Evil HQ somewhere that’s an extinct volcano island type-thing and a white cat, I’d imagine. Nothing against white cats, they’re cool – but I’m always a bit dubious of anyone who says “One Milliooooon Dollars” and has the aforementioned feline. ]
BUT…THEY HAD A SMOKING GUN, RIGHT?
So – it’s funny, isn’t it? { “alleged-name”: “Mark O.” } thought that they’d found some sort of smoking gun!
I can imagine him now, giving out high fives. To himself. In his bedroom.
Weeeell…….it was more likely that whoever it was, was not possessing a smoking gun, but instead smoking something rather stronger.
They thought that I’d been somehow “selling a Sportsbook” from under their nose.
When they worked at Champion / King, they’d even gone out of their way to tell the report writers that this (and I quote) “hosted a sports book system”.
It wasn’t.
It was literally two HTML pages and some images(!)
Hardly a sports book system!
The example page of what they found is here, via the web archive:
The funny thing is that this was a dummy marketing campaign that I’d made up during October 2020, during the course of my employment, to show how we could set up either a new brand or add some tiers of information to our Sportsbook product.
I mean, it’s not very good.
You can even see the text saying “Does not yet exist, built on demand”.
If I were, as they allege, actually selling this, I’d actually fire myself, apprentice style – and I’d totally deserve it too!
I never said I was a marketing genius. I’m not sure I’ll get a job as Chief Marketing Officer any time soon, more’s the pity, right?
At the time that I created this, our systems manager was away, and I couldn’t upload it to our own hosting, so I put it temporarily on an old domain that I had so that I could show my colleagues.
As it happened, not only did I forget to take it down (d’oh!), but the domain auto renewed via my domain registrar. Then, I clean forgot about it.
That I forgot in amongst all the hassle of a tribunal is totally my bad, and I put my hand up to it, it happens – not often, but it can!
What was really useful – the “forensics” team web archived it. That was pretty handy, as it turns out!
SHOW US THE FACTS! YOU CAN (PROBABLY) HANDLE THE TRUTH!
As you’ll know, I left Champion on 8th December 2020, as can be seen in various places in the judgment – which, also, as you know found resoundingly in my favour :-
The files themselves were uploaded during October 2020, and have not been touched nor altered since that point:
So, not too much of a smoking gun is it?
Looks like any accusations have as much substance as that short lived boy band in the 80s who made number 23 in the charts with “ooh, girl, you’re fantastic, we wrote a song.” (TM)
So, { “alleged-name”: “Mark O.” } – you’ll need to work a little harder, won’t you?
Oh yeah, one other thing, you found an old email of mine, at lycos.com :-
You probably didn’t realise that they stopped offering these free accounts on 1st June 2018, just before I joined Champion!
The best part is the report tried to link me to it using this piece of “evidence” :-
Do you see the dates last modified above, 14th of March, 2018?
This was actually before I started working at Champion! 🙂
Does that give you a hint? Anyone? Any Ideas? Any Ideas at all?
Anyway – so one thing – a mighty thanks for reminding me about this GitHub repo, which I’d forgotten about and neglected – luckily I had some access tokens saved locally and was able to rescue it. Again – probably not my greatest repo, and I’ve not used it or contributed to it for a LONG time, as is obvious.
So – your grade out of ten is a generous 2/10 for effort.
Try harder, { “alleged-name”: “Mark O.” }.