How did I save Team of Suriname

Once upon a time ... there was an evil ugly online chess cheater. He has been a photographer and regarded himself an artist.

His name was Dirk Van Appeldorn.

He created an account and cheated like subhuman monsters like him usually do. He thought he would get recognition with high rating. Unfortunately for him things didn't go that smoothly as he expected. His rating ceased to go up quickly - surprisingly he ran into other cheaters and really good players and his results weren't that good. Even worse for him - after the Big Ban event in August 2011 many team league and vote chess organizers realized the awful truth about cheating and refused to act as useful idiots anymore. The desired recognition didn't come and people became suspicious instead.

But our cheater knew a way. He abandoned his old account and created a brand new one. He combined his chess desires with his sexual perversions and with usefulness together and forged a profile as young woman now - his disabled daughter.

fake-Carola's fake photo (user: CaroWerlknack)

Abusing anonymity and using soft "feminine weapons" under female disguise, posting his own-made and copied photos, together with decent online rating (but carefully kept bellow the range of blatant cheating) he managed to deceive the naive community a lot. He even spent a few bucks and bought premium membership to avoid cheat suspicion and get the right to manage groups as superadmin.

Now little intermezzo about general naivety on chess.com. People tend to be gullible a lot. They trust others without checking, cheaters are often regarded as great players, fake women are loved and real good honest players are rare and quite ignored. The community was long time led either by complete useful idiots (kokino, mkaalam, king_arif, chess_kebabs) or even by cheaters themselves (Stefan1Zamfir). The situation however is not getting any better now: although the above ceased their disservices, new ignorant activists have appeared, e.g. BillyBantine, who decided to run "championships" without any entry barrier against cheaters and accepting anonymous players, "surprisingly" his recent so-called "World Championship" got spoiled by cheating a lot. Nothing can enrage me more than idiot cheater with ambitions to participate as leader of online chess community - this is just unacceptable for me.

Back to our topic: Exactly this I noticed here. The monster created two groups - GLOBETROTTERS & EXPATS and Team SURINAME international - recruited members and pretended criticism of avoiding team matches by other teams in forums. And here (s)he was spotted by me, the furious dangerous Polar_Bear.

I recommended "her" being trustworthy - use real name and biography, but immediately after this his ("her") reactions were suspicious, so I became nosey and studied "her" profile in detail. I found the female photos there were just gathered mostly from around the web. Soon the original old account was found and T3-method revealed the real source of "her" chess moves. When our cheater renamed his old account to avoid connections, things became crystal clear. Report ticket followed, however it took some time, but after re-submitting it by kohai our story ended. Both accounts were closed for cheating.

I should mention there is still one account I suspect to be his sockpuppet and backup: GreatestPuemmi. He didn't intend to cheat with this account and I can't prove connection, but go figure: Weird attempt in forums says it all.

[Edit 04-28-2014]
It came out our mysterious Dirk had to leave Europe for Uruguay - not because he loves to travel and photograph, but rather because he had been involved in quackery. No surprise for me here. Operating under name Dirk Budka and using greatly exaggerated and self-styled qualification credentials he ran advisory centre in The Hale Clinic of London. Alternative medicine is legal in the UK until proven fraud. The Hale Clinic focuses on holistic healthcare, bioresonance and other various dubious methods outside of evidence-based medicine. Budka-/-Appeldorn focused himself on allergy, metabolism and nutrition, but he had to drop it and go into hiding at some point in the past when he was revealed as quacksalver and fraud. I know no details, but his scheme allegedly included trousering patient's money for fake blood tests he had never done.