Originally posted by George Spellwin
A message to our members
Dear friends and fellow athletes,
This is a sad day for me. When I woke up this morning, I had no idea all of this would happen today. And I wish that I could tell you something more interesting than I am going to. I always love a good conspiracy – unfortunately, this is much less exciting.
My staff and I are neither associated with nor in trouble with the FBI, the CIA, the DEA, or even the PTA. My employee Rick is not an agent – he is a friend of mine who worked for me when I owned Mass Quantities, and decided not to work for the new owner when Mass Quantities was sold. I’m glad he’s back. We have not shared personal information about former moderator WarLobo, or anyone else, with the authorities – not only because we wouldn’t, but also because we have nothing to share. And on the only occasions that we have had involvement with Law Enforcement, we hired Rick Collins to make sure your member information was maintained safe, secure, and confidential.
Every couple of years, members freak out when someone plants the notion that all is not what it appears to be. Use the Search and you can see for yourself. Rest assured, if this was the case, we would not have been online since 1996.
This week, we unfortunately had to terminate one of our paid customer service reps, who was also a prominent discussion boards Moderator. It appears, and IP addresses undeniably confirm, that our former customer support rep was also intimately involved with the ChemicalMuscle.com web site. Let me state for the record that I am a big fan of the ChemicalMuscle.com site and I hear only good things about what they have going on over there -- although I have never actually been there myself.
With this said, Elite Fitness receives a not insignificant number of your Platinum Membership and eBook orders over the telephone. And the generosity of our customers and Platinum members is what keeps us online. Your financial support literally makes this community possible.
A special link had been provided to our support person for use in placing phone orders. Placing the orders through his special link would allow us to calculate and pay a sales commission on your inbound phone orders that were taken by our support rep. Although I would like to believe that this was not intentional, beginning in May and lasting until the present, our support person placed our inbound telephone orders through ChemicalMuscle’s affiliate link. So in effect, Chemical Muscle was getting 50% of the proceeds from your orders.
We finally realized what was happening when we noticed that the IP address, which would logically be different for each order, were all the same for Chemical Muscle’s affiliate orders. We then realized that the email address we were using to make our Chemical Muscle’s commission payments through PayPal belonged to our own customer service rep. Your money that makes this site possible was going into someone else’s pockets.
Although I like to assume that none of this was intentional, ironically our site was hit with a massive denial of service attack, which you may remember took the site down for several hours last week, shortly after the support staff changes were made. As such, we decided it was prudent to provide customer service from our New York office so accidents like this could not happen again.
We asked that our customer service rep/moderator leave elitefitness.com gracefully. And we encouraged him to make a farewell post, take some time off, and then return as an Elite Fitness Mentor.
Unfortunately, the gracious exit that I had hoped for did not take place. And the moderator that we asked to leave decided to make an issue out of the termination, bring with him his fellow Chemical Muscle moderators, and start rumors, which are blatantly untrue.
It is a sad story and one I wish I did not have to report to you, but that is all that has happened. When an employee is terminated, he often gets angry with his former employer, and the nature of this site and our popular discussion boards make this an enormous wailing wall.
Just to repeat, there is no security concern, no law enforcement involvement, no compromised email accounts – essentially there is nothing more than a popular employee who is disgruntled about being let go and who decided to make this as ugly and scary as possible out of anger towards his employer and coworkers.
Going forward, I hope we can make as little over this as possible. Please help me continue to make Elite the best bodybuilding site on the Net. And if you know someone who might like to help administer the Elite Fitness Community, we have an opening for a Community Administrator to be based in our New York office. And it’s a great place to work if I do say so myself. And from the looks of things, we also need to find about 7 new moderators. I hope you will help us select them.
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