If you haven't been following the Adrian Shiroma story, read the other installments on this page. It started pretty ordinarily…they spammed this blog…I wrote about my findings. Our friend Dragonportis helped out with a few big tips on what they were doing.
But now it is personal…threats against me and I have proof that Adrian Shiroma is not a real person and is a Forex scam.
The Proof
Apparently, we have been screwing up their “business” in a major way because now they are making direct threats against me. Here is the email that I got from them on Sunday.
Nice, to the point and they give exact numbers. Well, at least they are giving me 48 hours to comply. How considerate of them. They even gave me my own email address: KimuraDead@yahoo.com.
But seriously, check out the second to last line in the email…
“…we do not exist.”
Yeah, kinda figured that already.
And what is the ultimate threat besides “Kimura Dead”? That they will start using my name as the name of the scammer.
I wonder what they have in mind…oh wait, let me guess…
“Adrian Shiroma” writes crappy articles and puts my picture into it
So they started another free Forex blog on WordPress and started using my picture as the picture of Adrian Shiroma. Here is a printout:
Writing slander against me
They also started writing all kinds of bullshit about me. This is just an excerpt of the full article that shows up when you search for my name. Gotta love the misspellings and the totally made up information. Of course, I was not arrested for this and having a wife and kids is news to me. If nothing else, this has taught me that I need to tighten up the search engine results for my name.
I especially like how Cyr Circle is not a street anywhere in Hawaii. Good one guys.
What I'm doing about it
I filed a DMCA with Google, but I was largely ignored. It seems like they will not get involved if there is questionable legality. I also filed with WordPress, but they still allowing pictures of me to be posted in that blog. It is tough to combat these bastards because they are from another country.
What prompted the email in the beginning of this post however, was my posting this on the Forex Peace Army forum. They are the biggest Forex scam reporting website on the internet. According to one of the Moderators, FPA had a similar issue before and many other scammers have done the same since.
Here is his response to my post:
Thanks to the folks at FPA for their support. So prepare to see a hundreds of fake articles written about me…soon.
The bottom line is that this is more of a pain in the ass and a waste of time than anything else. But do you know what? The story has to be told and we have to stop these scammers!
And they are giving me something to write about. So I guess there is a silver lining.
What can you do?
If you have a blog or are a journalist, write up a little something on Adrian Shiroma and this scam that is apparently coming out of Bulgaria.
Do you know of other Forex scams that are going down? Tell us about it below…
Hope your week is going better. Now back to trading.
Cheers,
– Hugh
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Photo: *saxon* via Flickr Creative Commons
