I believe you are innocent unless proven guilty.
It is perfectly reasonable to assume you acted in good faith and shared a PPeH containing a scammer's e-mail without you realizing it.
Look, what these scammers do is they take the legit PPeH and change only one or a few letters in the section about where to find N on the internet. The rest of the book is untouched, making it look genuine. Actually, the PPeH explicitely gives a warning about this in the book.
I do know, based on what I saw, this specific scammer is:
1) Watching these forums, as he originally replaced a fake PPeH with a real one, right at the moment we were discussing this issue a few weeks ago.
2) Operating under multiple e-mail addresses (Protonmail, Tutanota,...), but the pattern is always the same in this case: an "a" is replaced with an "e".
3) Earned a minimum of about $5k in January alone, based on one bitcoin address I have of him. Since they constantly change bitcoin addresses it's impossible to know how much he/they really earned, but I assume it will be a LOT more than just this $5k.
I think the lesson learnt is that, from now on, only PPeH's who have been downloaded from Exit and uploaded by trusted users should be listed. Currently, only @RainAndSadness's uploaded version seems to fit this criteria. All others should be removed from the Wiki ASAP, which Rain is already working on.
In addition, I believe that, in the resources topic, there should be an explicit mention that the PPeH being listed there is uploaded by a trusted forum moderator, warning users no other sources should be used if they are looking for sources regarding N.
These scammers are smart and are proficient in certain IT skills. They are watching these forums and are laughing their asses off about the drama around this and legitimate users accusing each other of being lyers and scammers. Once alll their fake versions have been removed from the Wiki, they'll earn less money and will probably start to look for new ways tricking users on this forum. There are a few technical measures that can be taken (digital signatures, hashes), but this will not help all users. Reality is, there will always be some users getting scammed, but what can be done is to make it as hard as possible for the scammers to operate.
I think the moderator team should have a thoroughly discussion about all of this. Your version has been listed in the resources thread for several months (I assume you're the one who originally uploaded the 2018 one, but replaced it later with a 2020 one?), who knows how many people fell for it. Not even mentioning the Wiki, which contains other links leading to fake PPeH editions.
It is perfectly reasonable to assume you acted in good faith and shared a PPeH containing a scammer's e-mail without you realizing it.
Look, what these scammers do is they take the legit PPeH and change only one or a few letters in the section about where to find N on the internet. The rest of the book is untouched, making it look genuine. Actually, the PPeH explicitely gives a warning about this in the book.
I do know, based on what I saw, this specific scammer is:
1) Watching these forums, as he originally replaced a fake PPeH with a real one, right at the moment we were discussing this issue a few weeks ago.
2) Operating under multiple e-mail addresses (Protonmail, Tutanota,...), but the pattern is always the same in this case: an "a" is replaced with an "e".
3) Earned a minimum of about $5k in January alone, based on one bitcoin address I have of him. Since they constantly change bitcoin addresses it's impossible to know how much he/they really earned, but I assume it will be a LOT more than just this $5k.
I think the lesson learnt is that, from now on, only PPeH's who have been downloaded from Exit and uploaded by trusted users should be listed. Currently, only @RainAndSadness's uploaded version seems to fit this criteria. All others should be removed from the Wiki ASAP, which Rain is already working on.
In addition, I believe that, in the resources topic, there should be an explicit mention that the PPeH being listed there is uploaded by a trusted forum moderator, warning users no other sources should be used if they are looking for sources regarding N.
These scammers are smart and are proficient in certain IT skills. They are watching these forums and are laughing their asses off about the drama around this and legitimate users accusing each other of being lyers and scammers. Once alll their fake versions have been removed from the Wiki, they'll earn less money and will probably start to look for new ways tricking users on this forum. There are a few technical measures that can be taken (digital signatures, hashes), but this will not help all users. Reality is, there will always be some users getting scammed, but what can be done is to make it as hard as possible for the scammers to operate.
I think the moderator team should have a thoroughly discussion about all of this. Your version has been listed in the resources thread for several months (I assume you're the one who originally uploaded the 2018 one, but replaced it later with a 2020 one?), who knows how many people fell for it. Not even mentioning the Wiki, which contains other links leading to fake PPeH editions.
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