Yesterday’s entry about the ugly story behind the cancellation of the 2010 Taxslayer.com video contest seems to have gotten the attention of someone at Taxslayer.com.  On Tuesday afternoon, someone who called themselves “Sam Jenkins” left a suspiciously angry comment for me in the “Taxslayer.com lies to filmmakers, cancels video contest 20 days after submission deadline” discussion.  To leave a comment on a wordpress blog you need to leave an e-mail address.  To see if “Sam Jenkins” was a real person, I e-mailed him at the address he left.  The e-mail bounced back; the address  was fake.  Not a good sign.  Here’s the comment “Sam” left:

Author : Sam Jenkins

Comment:

Dude…get over it. You are right, as you proved, it is nearly impossible to create a quality commercial in 9 days. Your entry was awful. You would have lost anyways. Grow up, you should be ashamed of yourself. On another note I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy and his company slap a slander suit on you so fast your head spins.

Wow “Sam,” why so serious?? And if you think I suck so hard, why the heck do you read my blog?  I’m eager to address the points that “Sam” made and I’ll do so at the end of this post. But first I want to try and answer the question of who “Sam Jenkins” is.  I’ve been running this blog for 9 months and I don’t think I have EVER gotten an angry comment that didn’t come from someone with a personal axe to grind. I’ve covered a lot of people’s crappy behavior and bad sportsmanship here on VCN and sometimes those people find the posts about them and freak out.  They want to attack me but don’t want to make themselves look worse.  So they post under a fake name.   I think I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting fake names though.  For instance, I can’t help but wonder if maybe the name “Sam Jenkins” is a reference to legendary (and also fake) Internet nutball, Leroy Jenkins.

Over time, I’ve honed the art of figuring out who anonymous posters are in to a science.  After a few minutes of research and a few seconds of deduction, I can say that I am 99% sure that the person who posted as “Sam Jenkins” is actually The Assistant Director of Taxslayer.com’s Growth Division and the head of the Taxslayer.com video contest, DANIEL EUBANKS.  Mr. Eubanks is the person I have been TRYING to deal with at Taxslayer.com and he is the person that twice told me me that this year’s contest would “definitely not” be canceled.  Yesterday’s post was mostly about how he lied to me and how rude he’s been to me these past few days.  So besides the obvious reason that Mr. Eubanks doesn’t like me (he hung up on me on Monday as soon as I said my name!) I have actual evidence and facts to support my theory that Mr. Eubanks is our hater.  Note: Because I don’t want to be slapped so hard with a slander suit that my head spins, I should point out that I have no concrete evidence that the above comment came from anyone at Taxslayer…though I do have a whole lot of circumstantial evidence. I am not saying that Daniel Eubanks did this for sure.  But my personal opinion is that he did.

I used a very awesome piece of code in my website that lets me know a lot of information about the people who visit here.  Mostly I just see a bunch of cities and IP addresses when I check my logs.  But if you work for a company that is big enough that it names its network, I get to see the name of your company.  For instance, yesterday I got a visitor from “The British Museum!”

Taxslayer.com’s parent company is called “Rhodes Financial Services” and is located in Augusta, Georgia.  That’s the company that Mr. Eubanks works for.

When I got the announcement about the taxslayer contest being canceled, I e-mailed Mr. Eubanks and expressed my disappointment.  I sent him a link to this post from VCN.  It’s a list of all the 2010 Taxslayer entries.  I told him that I found 18 entries and that it seemed like there were more than enough to choose from.  After I sent Mr. Eubanks that link, I checked my web logs.  Sure enough, someone from “Rhodes financial Services” in Augusta, Georgia had visited my site.  I labeled this person’s IP address so that I could recognize them every time they visited.  This visitor took a special interest in my first post about the cancellation of the taxslayer contest.  They checked the discussion on and off all day long for several days, presumably to see what new comments had been added.

By last Friday, Mr. Eubanks had stopped responding to my e-mails and refused to take my calls.  I was really offended by this so I e-mailed him again and told him that I knew he was still interested in what I had to say because I could tell from my site’s traffic logs that he was checking Videocontestnews.com several times a day.

This is a very important part of the story.

So I checked my traffic logs on Tuesday afternoon and I noticed that the visitor from Rhodes Financial Services had been staying away from the site and hadn’t seen my LATEST Taxslayer post….the one where I explain how rudely this Daniel Eubanks guy had been treating me.

Then, at about 2:40 Tuesday afternoon, I got the angry comment from “Sam Jenkins.”  So I checked my web stats to see where the comment came from.  “Sam Jenkins” posted his comment from a Droid smart phone.  Posts from smart phones are untraceable because they list the cell phone provider’s IP address and the HQ could be anywhere.  Though I couldn’t tell where “Sam” was posting from, I could see how and when he had visited my site in the past.

The results of my search speak for themselves.  Here’s what how things went down:

The visitor from Rhodes Financial hadn’t checked the site all day on Tuesday and didn’t see the new, more explicit taxslayer post. My theory is that now that Mr. Eubanks knew I could tell when he visited my site, he was intentionally staying away.  But I think he couldn’t resist checking it again so he tried to be sneaky and checked the site with his phone.  At 2:41pm, someone (let’s call him Droid Guy) checked the site from a Droid phone.  6 minutes later, Droid Guy clicked the “view comments” button on the new post.   4 minutes after that, the visitor from Rhodes financial visits the site for the first time all day.  (maybe he couldn’t see it too well on his tiny phone and really wanted to study what I had to say?)  The Rhodes visitor clicked around like a mad man for the next 30 MINUTES.

In the middle of his visit, the Droid Guy returns for a moment.  Droid guy is back at 3:17 and goes directly to the comment section and leaves his rant.  He then disappears.  His brief visit occurs at exactly the same time that the visitor from Rhodes Financial has the site up on his computer screen.

I’m just going out on a limb here…but it seems very possible that Mr. Eubanks remembered that if he left a comment from his office computer I would know it came from him because of his IP address.  I think he didn’t want me to be able to link the “Sam Jenkins” comment to him so he thought he’d be a smart guy and whip out his smart phone so that he could post anonymously.  Again…that’s just a theory.

Here is part of a screenshot of my web logs.  Be aware that “taxslayer” is the label I gave to Rhodes Financial’s IP address so I could spot it when it popped up.  I also added the big red arrow to indicate when the Droid Guy left his comment.  Notice he was not on the site right before or right after he said his piece but the visitor from Rhodes certainly was.

I immediately suspected that “Sam Jenkins” could really be Daniel Eubanks of Taxslayer.com so I held the comment for moderation.  When trying to smoke out a hater, this is a great tactic.  It causes the person to check your site over and over as they wait to see if you are going to let their comment go public.  Droid Guy visited the site again later in the day but again, I have to assume the text was too small to read on a phone.  Two minutes later, the visitor from Rhodes was back and the Droid Guy was gone.  The Rhodes visitor checked the comment section of the taxslayer post all day long…as if hey were waiting to see if Droid Guy’s comment was going to be made public.  Rhodes guy stopped checking the site at about 5pm but Droid Guy checked it once or twice Tuesday night…like you know, maybe the person at Rhodes went home for the day and didn’t want me to know his home IP address so he checked the site from his phone.  First thing this morning though, the Rhodes visitor was back like crazy and has already visited the site a bunch of times today to see what comments have been posted.  The Droid guy seems to be gone though.  This is really suspicious because haters don’t just check the site 3 or 4 times and go away.  They act more like the visitor from Rhodes and check the site compulsively.

There’s one other big reason that I suspect that Daniel Eubanks is our anonymous hater; As far as I can see, the Droid Guy never visited VCN before yesterday yet he knew an awful lot about the videos I submitted to the taxslayer contest.  He said my entry was “awful” and that I wouldn’t have won anyway.  I didn’t provide links to my entries in my 2 recent blog entries about the cancellation of the contest.  So when could Droid guy have seen my videos?  I know that he never visited VCN before Tuesday so he must have watched my entry on another computer at another time.   And how did he know that I wouldn’t have won?  It almost sounds like Droid Guy had seen ALL the entries.

Like I said, I want to respond to a few of the points that “Sam” made.  So here’s his comment again:

Author : Sam Jenkins

Comment:

Dude…get over it. You are right, as you proved, it is nearly impossible to create a quality commercial in 9 days. Your entry was awful. You would have lost anyways. Grow up, you should be ashamed of yourself. On another note I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy and his company slap a slander suit on you so fast your head spins.

And now, my humble responses:

1.  It was not my intention to make a tv-quality entry.  I thought I was supposed to focus on IDEAS and not production values.  Taxslayer made it sound like they planned to re-shoot the winning ad, just like they did last year.

2.  Why should I be ashamed of myself?  Because I have the nerve to stand up for myself and not let people get away with wasting my time and my money?

3.  How do you know I would have lost?  Did you see ALL of the entries?  If so, where?  Like I said, according to my calculations, I had a 1 in 4.5 chance of winning 1st or 2nd place.  Seems like I had a really decent shot of winning.

4. I actually would have been totally fine with not winning.  I also would have accepted the fact that the contest had to be canceled if Mr. Eubanks hadn’t told me that the contest would NOT be canceled.  Losing is just part of the video contest game.  I entered the contest because Mr. Eubanks promised me a CHANCE of winning.  The only thing I was entitled to was that CHANCE but Taxslayer chose not to fulfill their employee’s guarantee to me so I’m going to fight to be compensated for my time and expenses.  We had an agreement and taxslayer refused to hold up their end of that agreement.  That’s why I’m upset.  It doesn’t matter who would have won, what matters is that NO ONE won.

5.  Regarding your prediction that Taxslayer will slap a “slander suit on me so fast my head spins;” you should invest in a dictionary because you have no idea what “slander” is.  First of all, Slander is the spoken form of defamation, Libel is the written one.  That mix-up aside, you still don’t understand the general principle.  Or maybe you do and you’re just trying to scare me into shutting up.  But just so you know, for something to be libelous it has to be both negative and UNTRUE.  If you want to start suing people for saying negative but true things you might as well just rip up the constitution.

Everything I have said in my Taxslayer posts have been true.  And when I was posting THEORIES about what I thought happened I never portrayed those theories as facts.  I have a constitutionally protected first amendment right to criticize, share theories and publish my opinions.  For example, my OPINION is that “Sam Jenkins” is really Daniel Eubanks and if I’m right, he better not dare try and intimidate me with empty legal threats again.

A few hours ago I e-mailed Mr. Eubanks and told him that I suspected that he was the one who left the angry “Sam Jenkins” comment from a Droid phone.  I told him that if he wanted to deny the allegation, he should let me know it wasn’t him.  So far, I haven’t heard back from him.

If I DO find any credible evidence that there is no connection between Droid Guy, “Sam Jenkins” and Daniel Eubanks I will immediately pull this post and make a public apology and correction.  Who knows?  Maybe it will turn out that Mr. Eubanks was sitting in his office reading my taxslayer posts and he called a co-worker in to see what some stupid blogger was saying about him.  And then maybe the co-worker got so mad that he decided to stick up for his colleague and so he whipped out his smart phone, went straight to my website, banged out an angry response and then left the site.  Then he stood over Mr. Eubanks should for then next 20 minutes as he waited for his comment to appear on the office computer’s screen.  Of course, that theory doesn’t really explain the earlier visits from Droid Guy but hey, I’m just brainstorming here.

If you’ve actually managed to read this entire, complicated story, you’re probably wondering why I would go through so much trouble just to try and prove that some random guy is a jerk.  Well the thing is, Daniel Eubanks isn’t just some random internet hater.  He was the man in charge of what WAS one of the biggest and best known video contests on the web.  I’m a filmmaker that entered that contest and I’m even a paying customer of Taxslayer.com.  If Mr. Eubanks did leave the “Sam Jenkins” commment, it’s a really disturbing development.  Assuming Mr. Eubanks is “Sam Jenkins,” here is a list of things he has done to me, a contestant in the contest he ran:

1.  He twice told me, in writing, that the 2010 taxslayer contest would “NOT” be canceled but then canceled the contest anyway.

2.  He refuses to acknowledge that he actually told me the contest was not going to be canceled.

3.  He refuses to answer my questions about the cancellation of the contest.

4. He gave me his phone # so we could talk but he refuses to pick up when I call.

5.  He has been ignoring my e-mails and voicemails since last week.

6.  The one time I called him from an anonymous # he picked up.  I told him who I was and he hung up on me.

7.  He (allegedly) tried to harass and intimidate me using a fake name.

8.  He (alegedly) mocked my entries and told me they were “awful.”

9.  He (allegedly) told me to “Grow Up” and that I should be ashamed of myself (for telling people he sucks at running contests, I guess)

10. He (allegedly) tried to get me to shut up by warning me that he and his company might file an unconstitutional law suit against me.

When you see all that stuff listed out like that you have to wonder how Taxslayer could possibly keep this guy employed after this.  This guy seems to have gone way, way over the line here.  He took what should have been a business matter and made it personal and now he seems tobe attacking me just for telling the truth.  But is it my fault that he gave me a written and signed guarantee about the contest?  Is it my fault he lied when he told me the contest wouldn’t be canceled?  Is it my fault that the guy didn’t even care enough to TRY and talk to me?  Should I just have shrugged my shoulders, said “oh well, I got screwed” and walked away from this?  For God’s sake, the guy has known that  I run a Video Contest blog since the first time we talked.  What the hell did he think would happen if he treated me like crap!?  Did he expect me NOT to mention it on the site?

Again, I don’t want to be sued so for the record, if ANYONE sees something in any of my posts that they feel is untrue they should e-mail me and if the concern is valid I will remove the information toot sweet.

MAY 18th UPDATE:  It’s been about 6 days since I e-mailed a link to this post to the head of the taxslayer contest, Daniel Eubanks.  I told him that I believed the comment in question came from him but that if I was wrong, he should let me know and I would set the record straight.  I told him that if he did not deny that he made the comment, I would take that to mean that he is the person behind it.  My web stats tell me that I’m still getting hits from Taxslayer HQ all the time, but so far Daniel Eubanks has not denied leaving the “sam jenkins” comment.