All Good Things Come to an End: 'SCAM SNIPER' discontinued!

For more than half a year, many of us were used to regular scam alerts on SFU's own sites linking to http://scamsniper.blogspot.com/ or their Facebook presence at http://www.facebook.com/ScamSniper. A week ago, on May 19th, both sites were permanently switched off by their owner and creator, Joshua Brunson, after having been 'temporarily' set inactive or even offline several days earlier for an extended 'evaluation' period (as had been stated by Joshua on his Page). The blog may actually have been disabled by Blogger, together with 'accidentally' shutting down a large number of other blogs due to a technical fault; things are somewhat shady here, but 'Scam Sniper' never returned afterwards. What we do have is a clear message from Joshua, published on Tony Mazan's 'The BULLDOG Estate' (where Joshua is a co-admin), as to closing his Facebook Page for good:

From the Owner of Scam Sniper:
"This will be brief. After more than a week of soul searching I have come to the conclusion that it is time for me to move on. The decision was not easy because I know I will miss this page and many of the people who I have come to know through it. It has been my pleasure to help you. I hope that most of you have found this page useful and have learned to avoid many of the pitfalls found on this social network and the internet in general, as that was the point of this page. If you wish to remain in contact with me, you are aways welcome to email me at: ScamSniper2010@gmail.com

Please stay safe. Good Bye & Godspeed
SS ~Mr. Black Knight",

You may still view the complete discussion thread at http://www.facebook.com/bulldog.estate/posts/10150178620761582 where we explicitly learn that it was NOT Facebook that closed the Page:

From MBK ( The Owner Of Scam Sniper ) @ Everyone:
Facebook did not close my page. I have decided to do so. No one forced me to do anything and No one scared me off.. It's just time for me to move on..

Joshua adds a li'l later:

From MBK @Anyone interested
This is my Twitter Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Scamsniperontwitter
It is the only thing that I will not close. Each day I read a lot of security reports/articles and have been tweeting the good ones. I even tweet some of the FB scam alerts I come across. If you would like you can follow my twitter feed or my twitter page.

Twitter Page:
http://twitter.com/#!/ScamSniper
Please realize that I will not be actively hunting Facebook scams personally any longer, so my twitter is not solely for Facebook scam alerts. I know a lot of you don't use Twitter so please don't feel the need to follow me there.. You may find what I tweet interesting or you may not..

Again, thank you all...



To sum up things: With the end of 'Scam Sniper', we are very sad to lose one of our most reliable and most active 'content providers' at SFU's own sites http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=121992391144317 (group), http://www.facebook.com/scam.fighters.united (previous page where we have lost admin rights) and http://www.facebook.com/sfu.page (our NEW page). 'Scam Sniper's content was automatically syndicated to our walls via NetworkedBlogs application, the feed even seemed to work (and now continues with some other content still available) after an earlier FB account of our creator and blogger here, Eckard Pfeifer, had been disabled several months ago. Joshua's thorough research and attractive presentation was highly appreciated at SFU even after abruptly splitting up our mutual collaboration around last Christmas (the reasons for which are still somewhat inexplicable to us). NetworkedBlogs allowed us to share and spread 'Scam Sniper's content after adding it to this app at --> http://www.networkedblogs.com/blog/scam_sniper/; here and at their respective link on Facebook  http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/scam_sniper/ we may still see the headlines of their last blog entries, but the links are not working any longer.

Tony Mazan lets us hope that his colleague will share his knowledge as best as he can on their commonly produced FB Page 'The BULLDOG Estate' http://www.facebook.com/bulldog.estate and the attached blog http://www.thebulldogestate.com/ (BDE):

Guys I am as Gutted as you Guys, i have spoken at length with MBK about this, long before he closed it, i respect his wish to close, but you have all got to remember this, you have not lost MBK you have just lost a facebook page, He is partowner here, he has full access to www.thebulldogestate.com , he has my full trust and respect, and i am sure he will pass his knowledge and some posts on the BDE, its not all sad and there is no reason to be upset, MBK will be here when needed and remember you can follow him on twitter and email him.......... Tony

BDE's blog posts will continue to be presented on SFU's current sites as before, together with about a dozen feeds from other scam alert and similar sites. But let's return to Joshua Brunson once more:


From ~MBK - Scam Sniper has not been deleted, it has simply been unpublished. I thought long and hard about simply leaving the page dormant, but I ran into one serious issue with that. Scam Artists have infested the page already. Some of them joined the page quite sometime back I believe and due to some type of limitation in being able to see all of the pages fans, I can not weed them out. If I left the page open, I would leave the Fans open to being spammed by them and by any new scammers that find the page. I can't have that.

I put a lot of work into the page and will not delete it. I have told Tony that he is welcome to any materials he would like from Scam Sniper. I will gladly download them from Scam Sniper and upload them here for him.

As far as knock-offs, All I can do about that is try to knock them off if they appear. Unfortunately Facebook is the knock off capital and that I really can't control. Note the whole time I was open I never found a Knock-off.. There are profiles named "Sam Sniper" and one page with the "Sam Sniper". These are not knock-offs or scammers, they profiles belong to other people.

Hopefully we will be able to rely on 'Mr Black Knight' (MBK) for sharing at least some of his knowledge in the near future. For those of you trying to grab parts of his content published in the past, you may check Google's cache and some items reposted on other sites --> http://bit.ly/kPMmLs; there are currently some 3350 search results, but please be aware that Google will progressively reduce them in the weeks to come.