Matthers is an invite/account trader, duper and was responsible for a DDoS on our site and tracker, together with some of his fellow Freshon staffers. This attack lasted for 5-6 days. You want evidence? We have it. We've been able to gather a lot of evidence on him in the form of direct confessions of his invitees, sometimes even accompanied with Paypal screens proving the transactions took place. There is not a single shred of doubt in our mind that Matthers is a trader. Therefore, I would highly recommend everyone to stay away from Freshon.

What happened

Recently I posted something on our own forum (https://hdbits.org/forums/viewtopic?...005105#1005105) to warn our users of the type of staffers that are running that particular site. And to adhere to our rules, which is not to offer nor request invites to Freshon. At some point soon thereafter, it was reposted to Reddit. This, in turn, lead to a sustained DDoS attack that lasted from 22-27 March. We now believe that Matthers and his buddies at Freshon were responsible for this attack, based on the following evidence:

DDoS

According to various sources. At the behest of Matthers there has been a sustained effort to bring HDBits down in retaliation to a Reddit post where we expressed our concerns about his (and in fact Freshon.tv) general behavior in the community.

Further, we have had reports from others where Matthers was gloating how he managed to bring the site down.

The outright malicious nature of this, brings us no choice but to publicize the evidence that we have of Matthers activity. We, are a site that is designed for the mutual appreciation of our members; not for commercial profiteering, which is what Matthers and his cronies are trying to accomplish.

Part of the DDoS attack, came from servers that we know that are directly linked to Matthers and/or other staff at Freshon. This was done by gathering reports from both the mitigation service we now have installed and other trackers showing activity from the following IPs.

** IP's censored for Reddit **

There are various other IPs that are linked to Romanian accounts on other trackers. In HDBits all these IPs belong to Fiona's account, also a fellow staffer on Freshon.

We are aware that the evidence provided in this post may yet again have Matthers resume the DDoS attacks, so if HDBits goes down in the near future, consider that extra evidence of Matthers' nefariousness.

Trading

For us, this attack is reason to release the actual evidence of Matthers being a trader. And that evidence is plenty. When we found out that Matthers had been selling his HDB invites, we treebanned him. After this, the confessions from his buyers came pouring in, sometimes even accompanied with paypal screenshots.

Matthers has been acting as middleman for several big traders (Factotum, f.ricky, etc), which is how they operate. They're using 'lieutenants' to avoid getting caught. The lieutenant, in this case Matthers, has access to invites, while the big traders have access to a large network of buyers. This is how they usually operate.

Matthers had 22 invitees from which 6 confessed. That may not seem like a lot, but, ask any other tracker staff, confessions are rare, so 6 is a lot. Note that the majority didn't even come to IRC. We realize that HDBits is a sought after tracker, so not even bothering showing up to try and recover your account is strange, to say the least. The number of confessions outweigh the number of denials from the subset of people who came to IRC. Besides, we don't need 21 confessions to establish that he is indeed a trader.

The irc log includes everything related to Matthers. Both confessions and denials, so it's up to you to make up your mind about this. Note that we pardoned hops in exchange for a confession + paypal screen. You may be able to see that he's disabled anyway. This was not a trick on our part, but one of the conditions of this pardon was that there can be no more secrets and no more trading in the future. In this case he simply sold his HDB account after he was pardoned, so he was later disabled.

The evidence itself

The invitee list from Matters:

https://hdbits.org/matthers/invitees.png

The irc log from our support channel: https://hdbits.org/matthers/log_censored.txt (Gaps are denoted with three dots)

The paypal transactions from 3 buyers (censored for Reddit):

http://i.imgur.com/xn0yj6a.png

http://i.imgur.com/tcUftUG.png

http://i.imgur.com/hPzaaNP.png

Mail from Factotum to an invitee, with instructions what to say to us:

"Try to recover first. Go in irc and ask them what happened. When they will ask you how do you know the inviter (Matthers), tell them that you know him from freshon.tv for about a year ago. He's a good guy etc under no circumstances do you admit that you bough the invite."

Matthers has had another HDBits account in the past, from 2011-2012, with the username Uffie. We know that this was him, because the emails used on that account matched up perfectly with email Matthers used on another tracker, which was friendly enough to confirm that those were Matthers' emails on that tracker. This account has also been sold, which is why he was disabled. This was probably his first HDBits trade.

Matthers shared GoRaPiD's (now pruned) HDBits account. He admitted this in irc when disabled: 19:56 <+Matthers> Its true that I've got one in the past..Uffie

19:58 <&LB06> You have logged onto IRC with the same registered nick from two different HDBits accounts.

19:58 <&LB06> Matthers and GoRaPiD

20:01 <+Matthers> I'm not gonna lie. This is true as well. Gorapid is a friend of mine and he shared his account with me. But since MM created my account,I gave up to Gorapids account

20:02 <+Matthers> I'm terrible sorry

Uffiie later turned out to be traded as well, unless he moved from Romania to the UK to Canada to China.

Conclusion

I think at this point it's completely and utterly undeniable that Matthers is in fact a trader. And it's not only limited to Matthers, but GoRaPiD (now pruned) used to share his account with Matthers. And both GoRaPiD and Fiona (who are Matthers' colleagues over at Freshon(!), regularly invited people for Matthers.

Now why should this convince you to stay away from Freshon, even though arguably, content=content? First of all, it has to do with security. How can you trust a group of staffers that willingly and knowlingly endanger the security of other trackers? Who is to say they don't log or store all your passwords in plaintext and use that to 'hack' account on other trackers such as HDBits? This is by far the most common method of 'hacking' an account; simply trying passwords from other (torrent) sites. Also, the moment private trackers start DDoS'ing and otherwise harming other trackers, we can say it's the beginning of the end for p2p. First IPTorrents, now this?

I post this publicly on Reddit, so Matthers has the opportunity to refute any evidence from this post. In fact, I invite him to come out into the open and discuss this matter with us in a public forum.

This is a serious accusation, didn't know the staff from freshon.tv is this fu**d up!

This only prove Matthers is a trader. There is no evidence freshon's staff have DDoSed HDB.

This is a serious accusation

Yeah, I think before accusing someone you should be 100% sure.

Hdbits are not kidds to post public shits. If they did this probably they have some reasons. I read in the post about ips etc :-D

Originally Posted by blacksquare

This only prove Matthers is a trader. There is no evidence freshon's staff have DDoSed HDB.

Yeah, I think before accusing someone you should be 100% sure.

True. That's why i edited the title. There are not any proofs against Matthers and the rest Freshon staffers.

I personally don't give a shit if they traded/sold the HDBits invites and i really like the Freshon staffers since they have a cool tracker and they don't ban even good users like some other trackers, just because their inviter's inviter did something wrong.

None of this is surprising in the slightest. Looks like the long-running rumours have been vindicated.

duh!! This is the perfect act of stupidity done by HDBs. Are you kids fighting in the streets? I really didn't expect HDB's leadership to be so amateur! This is their internal issue; solve it internally. Why making hype in publicly like kids and playing blame game! We know every good tracker share databases with each other to tackle down so call potential trader/sellers; if you don't want to let everyone know who your friends are? (off-course for obvious reasons) than you should also not talk about your foes publicly! I remember one of the former Admin of BTN was also found trading it's invites(?) than what? Do people boycotting BTN? This at one level seems propagandist and reactionary in my eyes! Such a big and reputed tracker(s) shouldn't do/make any such public statements like that! They haven't learned an inch from What.cd, BitME etc. they also got DDos and they tackle down traders/sellers almost on daily basis and never utter any word out a.k.a create negative publicity.

And, btw this way they are giving more chances to future traders/sellers from being exposed/caught by discussing it in public. poor management decision, I say it. It's like a girl overdressed like a whore bit*hing and seducing every passersby and when someone (might be Matthers) teases her than she starts to cry like a faggot that he raped her(a.k.a DDoSed)! It's only the girl who'll loose her integrity not the passersby! (think on it).

P.S: It's fucking so hard to get-in and manage HDB that expect few hundreds it never matters to people whether they got DDoSed or staggered by starvation.

P.P.S: I'm uselessly taking it seriously; I don't use any of them. So yeah! Go fuck each other.