Now that things have settled down a little, we have a few things to say and a few loose ends to tie up.

For those of you who don't know the full story, after our last report, someone showed up on our journal and, in an attempt to discredit us, tried to impersonate a mod from another community with "damaging information" regarding can_haz_sleuths. Unfortunately for this anon, the person she tried to impersonate had died from cancer back in 2006. Things got progressively ugly until, out of apparent desperation, this person actually hacked into said account and used it to prove their "identity". Out of respect to the innocent party, we aren't going to mention the hacked account by name here and we've screened all of the comments referring to it. However, the violation was reported to LJ Abuse and to quote livejournal's zero tolerance policy on the issue: "If there is proof as to the identity of the person responsible, all accounts owned by the responsible person will be terminated."

Within hours of that report, the violated account was suspended, along with all of the accounts related to the hacker (known to LJ Abuse), including hontou, reluire, tegobarbie (yes, this was a puppet too), melodyinmocha, floofykitten, teasongs, heartdropx, littlesandbox, orestelle, citysonata, aigasa, thirtyoclock. And these are just the ones we know about. So, that is why so many accounts were suspended so suddenly and that is also why they won't ever be unsuspended.

Again, we would like to reiterate that the above accounts related to the hacker were not the only accounts suspended that day. The journal she broke into was also suspended, and while it is usually a simple process to reclaim a hacked account, with the owner being deceased, this account and all of the memories within are permanently lost, all in the name of promoting a fandom fantasy.

In the aftermath, another anon calling themselves "The kpop hacker" claimed responsibility for the simultaneous surge of suspended accounts.

• According to the "hacker", they broke into 5 accounts belonging to 3 different people and that was the real reason behind the suspensions. Yet, 5 weeks later, none of these accounts have been reclaimed, despite the fact that it's fairly easy to reclaim an account once it's been compromised. The truth is those accounts CAN'T be reclaimed, as they all belonged to the same person, and were suspended for violating TOS.


• The so-called "hacker" claims they used the cuteprincessvivian@hotmail to call up info about various livejournal accounts, and once they found the passwords were the same for both enchantingly and ladybugsales, they attempted to access other ones too. However, livejournal passwords are encrypted and they are never revealed. That’s why if you forget it, you have to make a new one. The "hacker" might be able to get into various livejournal accounts, but only after resetting the password to a new one. They would never have access to the original password. The same can be said for Hotmail. Furthermore, the ladybugsales account was never suspended and is still around today.

So basically, this "kpop hacker" is yet another puppet, the purpose being to make the perpetrator look like a victim.

Yet, even with all that has happened, it doesn't look like this person has any intention of admitting defeat or throwing in the towel just yet. However, the Jin/Tegoshi feud, the Tegoshi/blonde dating rumors and the Aiba Hiroki/blonde dating rumors were all spread using essentially the same methods, so it shouldn't be difficult to to spot new scams and hoaxes when they occur. Take a look at the following report that surfaced within hours of the account suspensions and see if you recognize any familiar patterns:

1. The report itself has no source and the story wasn't reported by Japanese media. (It was originally posted on Tokyohive but they deleted it.)


2. The pictures used are old and stolen from another source- in this case a photobook from 2008.


3. The report is often posted by someone with an empty profile and low comment count.


4. Other sockpuppets show up in the comments section to validate and help spread the rumor. These puppets are also used to promote information not necessarily related to the topic at hand.


5. When the news report is proven false, multiple anonymous comments are posted in at attempt to "save" the story ("Ooh so maybe the hairdressing rumor was legit, it's just that the pics were fake!")

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And that's it. It looks like our work is done so we probably won't update this journal anymore. We'll still be around, though :)

If you would like to contact us, you can send us a PM or leave a screened comment in this post.

Well not quite. We'll get to that but first- we're back! We haven't stopped investigating since our first report, and in addition to the Aiba Hiroki link, we've dug up even more information relating to this story. Lots more! And we feel it's still very important to get the message out, especially to anybody who may be close to the person we're writing about.

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Aiba Hiroki dating blonde American from livejournal?!
Now about that headline: In late 2007/early 2008, a rumor briefly surfaces in the tenimyu fandom (The Prince of Tennis Musical). It seems that one of the actors, Aiba Hiroki, is dating a blonde American girl, and that girl has a livejournal account! How exciting and familiar.

• On Yahoo Answers (lol) user coconuts.kitty reports that yes, Aiba is dating an American girl and she has a livejournal account. They know because they've seen pictures of the two. If the username coconuts.kitty seems familiar it's because this (fake) picture of Tegoshi and his blonde "girlfriend" was posted by ameblo blogger "coconutskitty".


• On asianfanatics.net, user heartdropx also mentions the "blond American girlfriend" rumor. They know the girl's livejournal username and they claim the mods on Aiba Hiroki's livejournal community keep deleting all questions and even pictorial evidence concerning the couple. Once again, heartdropx is a sockpuppet. Someone with the same username can be seen on news_jpop, trying to convince everybody the Tegoshi Yuya vs. Akanishi Jin scandal (yet another fabricated story) is real. The OP of that post is sockpuppet littlesandbox, which we talked about in our previous report.


• Sockpuppet littlesandbox also has something to say about this rumor. She saw Aiba with a foreign girl in Tokyo and she's wondering if that was his girlfriend.


• This topic also reaches the Aiba Hiroki yahoo group. There is more than one thread about the subject but these two are important ones:
  
  
  
  • In the thread "Aiba has a girlfriend?" users talk about the rumor and two of them mention the blonde girlfriend's livejournal username. You guessed it, it's hontou.
  
  
  • A few days later hontou makes a post begging the other Aiba Hiroki fans to stop harrassing her. This post is very similar to the one she made recently on her journal.
  
  
  • In case you are wondering, yes, hontou was a big fan of Aiba too.
  
  
  
  


• it doesn't really look like this rumor caught on but you know what they say, if at first you don't succeed...

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There's still a lot more to cover, but before we continue, there are some things we'd like to recap from the previous post, as they are still relevant here.

(1) First of all, remember enchantingly was identifying as "Jaime from CT" all the way back in 2006? In case you forgot, hontou also is "Jaime from CT." Enchantingly also was accused of pulling a "Secret Santa" scam in 2005, though we didn't have any details on that at the time.

(2) We'd also like you to remember the role sunset_fairy played in these schemes, which is basically to validate stories and stall victims. She was also the one who originally spread hontou's story to journalfen.

(3) Finally, if you've been following the story, you probably read about enchantingly's alleged connection to an Australian rental scammer. This connection was made after an e-mail address associated with the Australian scammer turned up on ladybugsales, yet another sockpuppet selling journal connected to enchantingly. However, this incriminating e-mail address wasn't always there.

• This is LJ's atom (RSS) feed for ladybugsales, showing that the post was last edited on July 25, 2010, AFTER our original report but BEFORE tegobarbie posted her rebuttal.


• This search shows that it was originally a different email address.


• And this post shows that enchantingly's buyers back in 2006 also only knew of the original gmail address.

In the end, the fact remains that ladybugsales, a journal that had been dormant for years, suddenly was tampered with only hours after our report, and yet the result of that tampering seemingly favors hontou.

So let's get on to our new findings:

• In 2003, sunset_fairy was already identifying as Jaime.


• In a post from 2004, sunset_fairy's e-mail address matches the same username that hontou uses on ebay.


• In the same post, user elyntrea refers to sunset_fairy as Jaime too. It seems elyntrea and sunset_fairy used to be friends.
  
  
  
  • 2007, hontou makes a selling post for a friend. The items for sale link back to elyntrea's photobucket account, so they must have been friends.
  
  
  • This elyntrea is one of the few people in this saga who isn't a puppet, but a real person and unfortunately a real victim of hontou's deception. Her story as told on her LJ is a warning for anybody who happens to get too close to this person.
  
  
  
  


• secretsanta2005:Secret Santa 2005 - It appears the gist of the scam works thus: a community is created and is stocked with puppets (to name just a few: enchantingly, sunset_fairy, pixiedance, x_pirate_lass_x), then real members also join. The gift exchange is fixed so that the puppet master gets lots of gifts; most of the other participants receive nothing.


• amazonss2006: Secret Santa 2006 - Even after getting called out for fraud in 2005, the Secret Santa scammer comes back for another round in 2006. We found this one especially interesting. An unfortunate mixup sees that most all participants receive the same wishlist, and this time all gifts end up going to a "Jaime G" in Connecticut.
  
  
  
  • sunset_fairy, now a moderator, is here too, assuring everybody that there is no fraud going on here. It was all just a big misunderstanding!
  
  
  
  

There's still more.

• This thread from December 2008 actually refers to a sales post made in early October 2008 by hontou on her journal: 6 people never received the goods they paid for, and hontou refuses to give them refunds; ultimately ignoring them altogether. She deletes all comments from the sales post.


• All sales posts on hontou's journal are either deleted or locked but we were able to find a few other posts in which users wonder what happened to the items they paid for. In addition to the 6 people in the above thread, we were also able to contact 2 other buyers who confirmed they also never received their merchandise either.

Next up, kyuupi.

• There are two posts outing kyuupi as a scammer


• Take a look at kyuupi's email here. Now take a look at hontou's email. They're nearly identical aside from the "pp" which probably stands for PayPal. FYI, both emails are now blocked from receiving money on PayPal. Fun fact: You might have noticed hontou used this in the "Aiba Hiroki" threads too.


• hontou also uses the username "kyuupi" for other accounts such as neopets and twitter (see two comments made by user insepia).


• kyuupi tells people their orders were shipped but she is unresponsive when buyers try to contact her. She eventually deletes or screens all negative comments in the sales post. This is the same modus operandi enchantingly, ladybugsales, and hontou have all employed.


• One user in this thread also warns people not to deal with ebay user kyuupi.

kyuupi is also fashionne

• They both use the same ebay account. (Yes, it's the same one warned about just above.)

fashionne is also hontou

• Both hontou and fashionne go by the name "kyuupi" on neopets.com


• Both hontou and fashionne use the same e-mail address


• Both use the same repnation* links.


• Even fashionne's profile used to have the name "mimi", which is hontou's nickname.

*Repnation - Repnation.com assigns unique links to each user and whenever other people click those links, that person gets points they can redeem for rewards. fashionne posted a link to the liv crayloa facebook page and the user "hontou" can be seen posting the exact same link on slickdeals.net

• There seems to be some confusion in this thread but user mamegoma assures others everything is working fine. Guess who mamegoma is?

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This is only a small part of the information we've uncovered in recent weeks tying all of these characters together, but this post is already deep in tl;dr land so we've tried to limit this report to the most important links only.

That's all for now. We'll be keeping an eye on the situation, so if you think you've had an encounter with another reincarnation of "Barbie", tell us! If you think you've been SCAMMED by this person contact the proper authorities. (And then tell us! Maybe we can help.)

The Story

12/31/2008 enchantingly: Tegoshi Yuya snubs fans for beautiful blonde[screencap]
On December 31, 2008, a concert report is posted to news_jpop with various tidbits of information collected from several Japanese blogs, including the casual mention of News' Tegoshi Yuya singling out a blonde foreigner in the crowd.
Update: For reasons unknown, this report was deleted from news_jpop on or around July 17, 2010. A google cache page can still be found here.

02/10/2009 [anonymous]: The name hontou appears
Two months later, the name hontou is dropped in an anonymous hate meme as the identity of the mysterious blonde. hontou, a wealthy blonde Yale student, is a popular player in NEWS circles. Hers is the only name ever put forth as the identity of the mysterious blonde.

The rumor is kept more or less alive through anonymous hate memes [at shiokku] and secrets [at je_secrets] over the next several months.

08/21/2009 kaburi: LJer spots Tegoshi with a blonde at a Japanese nightclub[screencap]
It's 7 months later when a very lucky LJ user has an exciting night on the town, spotting Tegoshi at a night club and getting a pretty good description of the blonde he left with.

10/19/2009 enchantingly: Rumors of Tegoshi + Blonde resurface[screencap]
Almost 2 months later, enchantingly digs up more information from Japanese sources that seems to corroborate kaburi's sighting in the nightclub. Two different Japanese bloggers have seen Tegoshi with a blonde foreign woman and it seems they're not happy with it.
10/19/2009 astrawberrykiss: On the same day, "Ichigo" astrawberrykiss reports in her own blog very similar findings to enchantingly. The report and the journal have recently been deleted, but a screencap can still be seen here: http://tegobarbie.livejournal.com/1028.html

01/04/2010 [anonymous]: A picture this time![screencap]
In January 2010, a picture of a couple appears on Japanese blog site ameblo. The blog claims the picture is of Tegoshi and a blonde foreigner, but as it's taken from behind, it's hard to tell. Regardless, the story is almost immediately picked up and posted anonymously to another JE fandom hate meme.

04/07/2010 enchantingly: Tegoshi Yuya’s girlfriend attends L.A. movie premiere[screencap]
This time Tego's new girlfriend was spotted at the U.S. premiere of his latest movie, chatting familiarly with the staff but otherwise trying to look inconspicuous.
04/07/2010 melodyinmocha shares the same report[screencap] on news_jpop and includes a confirmation of the story provided by tinycharm.

06/01/2010 tinycharm: Tegoshi Yuya’s girlfriend’s phone stolen by crazy fans.[screencap]
tinycharm this time with the report that crazy fangirls have stolen and hacked into the supposed blonde's cell phone. They leak a shocking image of a sleeping Tegoshi reportedly taken from the phone.

[The following was ADDED September 2011]
08/23/2010 Tegoshi Yuya spotted on a hairdressing date ( news_jpop / aramatheydidnt)
A tabloid report with paparazzi pictures of Tegoshi on a date with a blonde foreigner.


Some of the reports and stories above sounded a little suspicious to can_haz_sleuths, so we decided to investigate.

( Follow the cut to the full story )

Disclaimers:
1. Given the nature of this report and findings therein, there was simply no way to do this without revealing user names.
2. All of the info provided within was public from the time we collected it until this report was made public.

You can say anything you want here. All comments are screened.