THE LIES and the reputation damage

 

Lie # 1. ENCRYPTION AND BLACKMAIL

• Official statement in the Announcement channel, tagging all their 2,000 users: "Unfortunately we discovered that Gabe, our dev, tried to encrypt the data and to steal our private keys. We are solving the problem. We ask for a moment of patience. We will keep you updated."

• Message published in the #general channel by one of the founders: "he stole all the data as he was one of the developers, and right now he is blackmailing us"

The truth:

No one tried to steal any funds. I had no access to any funds to begin with. I only had the ACTIVE key of the farminggames account in order to send the Polly NFT, not the one with the funds.
And regarding the data, it had been encrypted for almost 2 weeks (proof below), and I TOLD THEM BEFORE.

During one of our daily check-in calls I explained that I left the data in plain text during the alpha phase of the bot only for debugging purposes. And that immediately after the alpha, when I updated all the records to recover the balance of users that had been affected by bugs, their wax accout was being encrypted already. And I added that then after the beta all the messages (sent into Hive) were encrypted as well.
The team may have not understood what I was saying (they are not technical people.. they self-taught how to code and never developed professional software before [except for the Taco team that joined them at the very end of this]) but for sure their "initial-founder" (Lykos) understood at the very minimum that the wax account names were encrypted. In fact for the initial distribution of the SEST tokens, at first he wanted to do all the transfers manually but then because I reminded him that the data was not in plain text, he asked me to write a script that took care of sending the token to all our users' wallets.
So if he knew that at the very minimum the wax account was encrypted.. what difference did it make even if he didnt get that after the alpha all the messages were being encrypted? That data in the DB would most likely been unusable anyway without the decryption key because they couldnt link the wax accounts to their balance, so what's all the fuss about realizing that shortly after the whole record was being encrypted as well? Encrypting the rest of the message didnt really make much difference for the purpose of using that data.
And why was it done to begin with? Because it contained sensitive information that allowed to link a Hive account to a Discord account and a wax wallet. Since we also dealt with many users from Europe I had to worry about GDPR and its privacy and security policies.
Eg. if all the discord IDs were in plain text in our DB (public on the Hive blockchain) it would have been trivial for an attacker to target all the Farming Tales users with a bot to send them DMs with phishing links to fake FT drops!

Hey, but you don't have to believe me though. Luckily I decided to use Hive to store the data and, as every blockchain out there, it's immutable!

So here is some proof. You can check yourself all the edits done to every single record containing the Discord bot data:

• Here is where the data was publicly stored in the Hive blockchain until October 12th:
  https://hiveblocks.com/cat/@farmingtales/registrations-and-diffs-db
  ( note1: the whole team was on board with this appraoch )
  ( note2: this link was also shared to our users in some Discord public channels and was also put in the last article I wrote on the FT blog: https://peakd.com/hive-151527/@farmingtales/did-you-just-say-3d-blockchain-game )

To check all the changes made over time to any record of the database:

1. Click on "Properties" under one of the entries, and copy the "permlink" attribute like in the picture below:

2. Replace "PERMLINK_HERE" in the link below with that text that you just copied:
https://ecency.com/cat/@farmingtales/PERMLINK_HERE?history

Example:
https://ecency.com/cat/@farmingtales/ft-tbcx4wa-198-record-44387bfj4?history

And voila', you can see all the edits ever done to that user data over time!

Example:

So, looking at the link above for example, you can note that all the messages started being encrypted on October 2nd and that the wax account was already encrypted before that!

So, with this new knowledge ... who is the villain now??

And did I ever say (villain voice) "I have all your data, give me all your money or no data"?
Nope. As soon as Lykos reached out asking for it (and saying that I would get my share of the sale), I gave it to him (as soon as I got off a production release meeting at my day job).

But.. let's take a step back..
..why was I fired to begin with? Whose mother did I insult? Why did the project initial-founder fired me on the day of the launch of the game? So many questions, so little time!
Well.. I knew shit was going to hit the fan so I started screenshotting everything and executing commands in my bot to make an archive of all the FT Discord channels I ever messaged in.
So, after reviewing old conversations and without going into too many details, I think this summarizes what happened:

The team in the last few days before the launch of the 3D game was relying on me to put together the parts required to go live (objectively speaking no one else in the team had the technical competence to do so). All this without proper tasks or estimates. Just "is it ready yet" questions all the time because that's how they ended up working at that time.
So, following that unstructured appraoch (despite my effort of making them work in a more organized way introducing Agile to the team), I told them what I thought the evening/night for the potential launch night looked like for my tasks and gave them some rough estimates.
Then the team members got rude because there was an unexpected issue with the domain providers that they set up way back prior to me joining their team. I was not made aware of that issue before and the initial-founder decided to jump on it and just made it worse causing confusion, conflicts and stress.
So.. setting up the last steps of the infrastructure was taking me a little longer than I had originally anticipated and the team was not being supportive at all. The founder (that did not mention anything before [even though we used my architecture in the days before to let the support team do our first tests]) came out saying "I told you to use {cheap-server-name-here} (the one that then caused the outage that they tried to pin on me). And it wasn't correct that he told me to do use that, it was just a misunderstanding due to him being non-technical and using incorrect terms (eg. static hosting of a website vs backend). Despite being annoyed by that, I kept my mouth shut and kept working.
I started working on those last steps required for the release at 5pm after work and except for a one-hour break to take care of my 6 month-old baby and eat, I was then up until 1 in the morning working hard to get everything done in time.
So, earlier that day we already said that I took some shit (pardon the french) and stayed calm during that "I told you to do that and that, why did you do that otherwise" conflict, even though another team member was being rude posting a youtube of Gandalf in loop for 4 hours to mock me and something similar from another founder. All this despite them having no clue about what I was doing, being them non-technical people.
That night eventually I managed to do everything that was required to launch: create the prod build, set up caching, SSL certificates, set up the CDN, redirections, link the CNAME to my infrastructure, put together on the fly a script to let the founders programmatically distribuite the SEST tokens, etc etc. They were supposed to show up at my midnight (their 6am) to start testing and the migration, but no one did (they probably talked crap in their discord voice channel while I was working and decided not to, without telling me). So, disappointed, after 1 hour waiting for them, I went to sleep.
When I woke up only 4-5 hours later, they seemed mad when I told them that I couldn't help them for a few hours because I had a demo and a production release at work.
{ Our agreement was that I had to work 2hs a day and if you count the weekends, I pretty much worked 6hs a day on top of my day job, on average }.
Shortly after, I was given more shit because the bot was down. But it wasn't. It was just the Wax network that was having issues and I even pointed them to some users explaining that in one of the public channels.

---

_{Gabe | farmingtales 💻 🤖 ⛓ 🕸 — Today at 08:45
[the problem is that today I am not available until your 11pm (my 5pm), I have a demo and a production release]
il problema e' che oggi fino alle vostre 23 non ci sono, ho una demo e una release in produzione
| farmingtales 🌾 — Today at 08:44
[so we tell the users that they have to wait until 11pm?]
quindi agli utenti diciamo che aspettano le 23?
Gabe | farmingtales 💻 🤖 ⛓ 🕸 — Today at 08:45
[well yes, I didn't put that announcement out.. at 11pm we can start the 2hs migration.]
eh si, l'announcement non l'ho fatto io
alle 23 possiamo cominciare le 2 ore di migrazione
| farmingtales 🌾 — Today at 08:47
[the announcement was put out because your bot left us in shit again]
l'announcement è stato fatto perché il bot ci ha nuovamente lasciati in merda
Gabe | farmingtales 💻 🤖 ⛓ 🕸 — Today at 08:52
[I'm gonna change my career path then, thanks for the advice. From what I read wax was down...]
vado a fare lo spazzino allora, grazie per il suggerimento
se ho capito bene wax era giu'
| farmingtales 🌾 — Today at 08:53
[yes, there have been issues on wax this morning]
c'è stato qualche problema in mattinata
Gabe | farmingtales 💻 🤖 ⛓ 🕸 — Today at 08:55
[at the same time of the error logs of my bot, so... my bot wasn't down, wax was down]
agli stessi orari dei log con i problemi, quindi....
il bot non e' andato giu', era wax che era giu
https://discord.com/channels/841022174219206657/890986281557966908/897745928373563443
| farmingtales 🌾 — Today at 08:56
[could be but since we had to stop the bot anyway today and users were asking, I put the bot channel in read-only mode]
puo' essere ma visto che il bot andava fermato comunque, e che gli utenti chiedevano, ho fermato
Gabe | farmingtales 💻 🤖 ⛓ 🕸 — Today at 08:57
[then don't come out with these statements (bot left us in shit), thank you!]
E allora non fare queste uscite, grazie!}

<founder>: "I can say whatever I want and do not let me repeat always the same things"

Gabe: "Of course my emperor, I apologise"

<founder>: "You are forgiven"

Gabe: "and what same things?"

<founder>: "that here I am the boss" (and therefore I can say whatever I want)

Gabe: "you can be the boss, but you can't be rude/bad-mannered"

(all the team members except me [day job] were in one of the private voice channels while all this was happening)

  Since the way I was being treated, and because:

• That day I was giving away the rest of all the work I had done until then
• The next Drop (sale) was scheduled 2 days after the release of the game
• The sale was almost certain to be sold-out as quickly as in a few hours and reach the $ 450,000.00 total value
  ..I asked him if he could gently give me his personal info and that I would do the same when we finally formed the company.
  I had worked like crazy for the past month and almost for free (I got something at the beginning but that wasn't much compared to my usual rates). I only had the promise/agreement of getting the 20 % share of the project/company but since the way I was being treated I said that I needed his info because, if for some reason the agreement did not get respected, I needed a way to get what was due to me. I added that I hope that we never get to resolving conflicts that way and that I hoped we could re-establish an harmonious working environment, but seen the lack of professionalism I did have to protect myself asking for his personal info.
  Lykos replied saying that I was fired (I wasn't an employee though but a partner and co-founder.. it doesnt work that way.. 🤔) and said that I was only going to get the 20 % for the work done until then and nothing else in the future, despite having worked for a share of the company.

Screenshots of this conversation: [italian]

So...

• Lykos brillantly decided to fire me on the day of the game launch after I worked like crazy for it and slept only a few hours to get everything ready. Not cool and not really legal, you should discuss the issues and try to buy a partner out if you really can't come to an agreement. You cant just remove him because he is not willing to take all your shit (pardon the french) / rudeness. I am used to professional environments and their behaviour was over the line quite often.
  There was another issue, he also forgot that the user data had been encrypted 2 weeks before and that the team never created the account to add to my Gitlab repository with my code and the encryption keys. I had asked them if they could do that instead of me, since they didn't have tasks assigned to them and I was the only one busy working on technical tasks (poor tasks management on their side), but no one ever bothered to do it.

_{[ To be honest though I reminded them only once again and then stopped since they kept postponing the creation of the company and after all they were only strangers on the Internet that didnt put anything in writing yet for my work to be paid in shares of the company. I wanted to make sure I was getting what I was working for before giving them my non-obfuscated code. A version of my code though (obfuscated for security reasons - normal) was already deployed to the test environments that I setup for them and that we used for internal testing with the support team. ]}

• After a while another founder contacted me saying "We decided that you can come back but only if you give us your code first, we want another dev to review it"
  LOL.. yeh... sure. Guess what was gonna happen once they received that code...

• I replied that, since the way I had been treated, they could have access to my non-obfuscated code as soon as we either formed the company or Lykos sent me his information (eg. name, last name, address) in order to protect myself that I had been working for over a month almost for free.

• I got kicked off the team private channels and was told I was not going to get paid

• 5 minute panic/shitshow (until I had to join another important meeting at work)

• The FT team put out their lies while I was busy at my day job and was not in their Discord anymore.

And the rest is history:

"greed is an ugly beast" - I agree, especially when you decide to kick out a member of the team that had been crucial to the success of the project and not give him his shares. More shares for them.

My own meme for the whitepaper used against me, how cute.. :)

"he tried to be smart but he couldnt".. mm.. yeh smart people don't like to work for free I guess..

No clarification from the team. Their users simply assumed that they were able to recover the data somehow. And that I was still an asshole.

This clarified nothing and was not an announcement. Putting out the good face, but now you know what actually happened behind the scenes.

"Not everyone is dishonest in this world, and I don't want to be.."
Too late. Isn't it dishonest to make someone work for a share of all future profits and then change your mind just because you go on a power trip and decide to remove him because "he is not your little bitch and he is sick of taking your shit and your rudeness"? (please pardon the french 😅)

In that message he made it sound like I stole, then was convinced to give everything back and they decided to forgive me and pay me anyway if I stepped away from the project. But the order of events is very wrong. I had already been banned for a while at that point.. 😏

Very misleading.

Let's just hide it under the carpet and let everyone thing Gabe is a scumbag. Sounds like the easier way! And we can keep making money and do whatever we please with his share. 😃

    Oh, all the love.. just great. Thank you FT team.

Oh, and since they already were at it..

- One of the founders started removing all rewards from my posts on Hive (using "downvoting power" that users lent him in exchange for votes on their posts)

- But who was he downvoting? My account that protects users against hacks, key leaks, scams, etc. And that bot of mine even saved a user that accidentally leaked the key to his wallet containing $ 28,000. I must really be a thief as Farming Tales claimed, right??  

Did I ever tell them "pay me or I won't give you the data"? Nope. And when the initial-founder reached out to me asking for the data (and offering to give me my part of the sale) I did it immediately.
Getting something is better than almost nothing, but that does not exclude going after them in court to get also what came after thanks also to all the work I did in that critical month before the 3d game launch (see "my list of contributions for the FT project" section). As mentioned, I'll see next year if it's still worth my time (or if they collapse like their NFTs, token and game experience have been doing).

Going back to all the hate above, something that bothers me is that the team never really clarified to their 2 thousand plus users in their Discord what happened.
They put out lies, let the users hate me and then gave some half answers afterwards. Nothing to clarify the situation. They wanted to hide what happened because they had a sale 2 days later. And I was told to keep my mouth shout or I wouln't even get my cut of the sale. Guess whose reputation and pockets ended up damaged..

But I'm the bad guy.. sure.

Eventually I was sent my part of the sale so that's an additional proof that I did not steal anything (why would you ever pay someone if they tried to steal money from you? 🤔😏)
https://wax.bloks.io/transaction/890c21c08853c8a1f6396e46b7703944531567789178d248b0ea095e72ca2735

 

Lie # 2. GABE IS DDOSsing US

October 17th
The initial-founder of FT reached out in DMs and accused me of attacking their servers to cause an outage.
He insisted with a heavy tone, cursing and showing some allegedly proving screenshots. Proof being that according to him I forgot my wax account in the network requests I used to attack their servers.

So.. let me understand this one..

• I give him a wax account to receive my cut of the last sale.. and then I use that account to DDOS his server?

• While I am attacking him I immediately reply to his messages (explaining him that it's not me) and even offer him my help?
  Right, makes sense.

• He also claimed that to perform the attack I was using the AWS account that I had set up for their game.
  Really?? I would really use a cloud provider that has all my data and billing information?!

Then I checked their URL and got this.. ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS

So I told them what the issue and solution was. They misconfigured their load balancer so requests were bouncing in an infinite loop between the LB and their backend....

https://stackoverflow.com/a/52598630/4317945

So, in the end, that happened because they first went with their cheap servers, then they upgraded them at the last minute when they realized that what they had wasn't enough (I'll skip their other technical flaws that caused that) and then in the rush of setting everything up they misconfigured their load balancer and tried to blame me..

Notice the parrot added by 2 members of the FT team, to hint that it was me.
[The parrot was one of my successful creations for the Farming Tales project - (proof of ownership: I also programmatically minted some test ones from my own wax account]

So.. just great.

By the way, the use of that cheap server was one of our previous internal conflicts.
Some others conflicts were:
1. Pretty much abandoning Hive after getting a lot of attention from their users thanks to a post that I spent a few hours preparing and then got into Trending thanks to some of my contacts on Hive.
2. Lykos saying "we do as I say" when we were discussing the game architecture and I replied "should I turn off my stuff and leave?" -> mostly caused by the fact that he never mentioned before that he was the "boss", especially when I was introduced to the project and asked them a thousand questions to decide whether to join them. He even declined the admin position when we discussed creating the company. So then him sometimes coming out and treating me all bossy and telling me what to do even though he had no technical background and was making some mistakes, made me push back a few times.

3. Last but not least.. other conflicts started when Lykos went behind my back and assigned some of my work to an external team (Taco), without even telling me and wasting time in duplicated efforts.

And was it because I sucked at my job? Not really. They knew from the beginning that I had limited free time. And they were satisfied with my achievements (see for instance the screenshot in the "my contributions" article).

But.. now, do you understand why I stopped reminding them about accepting the invite to my code repository? There were definetively some red flags. And they revealed their true nature later on, as you all saw.
And why did he give some of my tasks to the Taco team (without properly communicating that to me)? ..because they gave him better estimates to complete the job. First, they were full time. And second, they took some common shortcuts that caused issues later, as I initially suspected. And due to the poor communication (eg. meetings without me) then I was supposed to inherit and migrate a backend that I was not familiar with.

But.. back to the DDOS blame.. after putting out an announcement that hinted that it was me, nothing was clarified afterwards. Again, not cool.

{ Oh, and at the moment of writing the SEST price crashed all the way from 4.1 to 0.48. Must be Gabe! }

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Nov 12th '21