Is Phantom Really Norman Holmes?

Just a quick one since I noticed that spamgossip has vastly modified its content.

All posts referencing anything but LIZZA have been taken down!.

Indeed. When did that happen, Marion? And for what reason? Someone bringing more heat than you expected?

Looks like his identification of Phantom as one Norman Holmes of Perth, Australia was probably correct, and this appears to be reflected in Phantom's complete silence on bulkerforum and most other places we'd expect to find him.

That may also mean that he's been correct about the identification of many others. How did he get this information? Who would trust an idiot like Marion Lynn with their personal data? He certainly wasn't welcome on bulkerforum for most of the time he was there, and in a relatively short span of time he managed to completely piss off most of that forum's members. I can't fathom who would openly share this kind of data with him, but clearly whoever they were: they were successful in providing a ton of evidence to the completely wrong guy. (It's apparent that a lot of the info came from Lizza aka Steve Joseph, as evidenced in the remaining AIM chat transcripts, but there must have been others, as this info paints a far from complete picture on its own.)

This whole thing looks fishy, and in the grand scheme of things proves that no real heavy hitters were actively posting on bulkerforum anyway.

Phantom's last posting in the public areas of bulkerforum back on Nov. 15th was mostly a whiny rant about Nick Danger and his original posting on the NANAE newsgroup. He further alleges that Marion Lynn is now guilty of computer hacking. That's a pretty ridiculous conclusion to come to, Norm. :) We all know that Marion's computer expertise does not extend beyond the most basic workings of frikkin' AOL for christ's sake.

Anyway it's interesting, and I'm certain that I'm not the only one who has noticed this stunned silence from the bulk (get it?) of bulkerforum members.

You may have heard about the scads of recent arrests of individuals involved in botnet ownership and operation, theft of personal data and credit card fraud just in the past two weeks. This has been a banner year for cracking down on the scum that continue to send everyone illegally propogated spam messages to people who don't want them, promoting products which are not only unwanted by 99.99999% of its recipients but are also fraudulent, counterfeit, and in some cases fatal. I fully expect to see more arrests in the coming months, and who knows: maybe we'll see a Mr. Norman Holmes behind bars for enabling so many mailers to illegally use services which are not theirs for the propogation of illegal spam using his infamous WarpSpeedMailer software.

The old adage is true that whenever you shine a light on a bunch of cockroaches, they scatter and hide in record time. Spammers, apparently, are absolutely no different.

SiL / IKS / concerned citizen

P.S. Of course I and many others have complete sequential backups of spamgossip including all of the personal data which was posted regarding Norm Holmes and others. I won't repost all of it here just yet, but it's definitely still out there. Also: that original NANAE posting and several others still contain this same information including all of the images of his household, the location of his house, and his god-awful taste in furniture and upholstery. None of that is going away anytime soon.