EA Has committed a huge breach of confidentiality and security by not only passing on the complaint, but also the IP of the complainant to TSR. Furthermore a complaint that was meant to go to EA’s legal department was blocked from arriving there by EA’s community manager, Sherrie Dandan. Sherrie also alerted TSR on the number of complaints they have received and how they were submitted at the same time as thanking TSR for their bribe ‘gift’ sent to their offices.
This resulted in the WRONG person getting the blame for making the complaint, causing a 13 year old girl to have her online accounts hacked. The girls mother had not made the complaint she was accused of, instead she complained to TSR over what she deemed was inappropriate messages between Thomas and her child over MSN.
I checked the IP’s myself and it is pretty clear that the girl and her mother have completely different IP’s to the complainant. Steve would know this, which makes me think that the whole blame game was manipulated by Steve/TSR in order to ’show off’ a series of Emails between Steve and the EA community manager to prove Steve’s point that EA really do not give a shit who gets hacked. The girls mother had previously asked for advice on the shoutbox here, ( 27th May ) it was a pretty safe bet she would be back in contact when she was blamed for something she did not do, thus showcasing Steve’s validation of EA support.
Below are screencaps of the entire communication, with the childs name/email removed and IP of the real complainant. Sorry about repeat lines, it was the only way I could screencap this in several shots while showing that there is nothing missing from the original. As with all fowarded emails, it may be a good idea to read from the bottom upward to get the full gist and context of the email exchange between Steve and the mole. Also available in TEXT versions for translators.
It is fair to add the deletion of this young girls account is NOT the issue here, as this was the wish of her parents. The issue is TSR hacking into her EA account to make her believe EA had banned her for making a complaint and that they also hacked her Twitter/google/youtube and deleted her personal videos of something they knew meant a lot to her.
We have learned many things from the communications between Sherrie Dandan ( EA community Manager ) and Steve Bonham ( TSR joint admin and part time prison guard )
- Sherrie Dandan is willing to block all complaints intended for EA legal.
- Sherrie Dandan is willing to share private communications intended for EA legal.
- Sherrie Dandan is willing to share a paying customers IP with the group they have just revealed as hackers.
- Sherrie Dandan is willing to give TSR the number of complaints received ( and blocked from reaching their destination. )
- Sherrie Dandan is willing to accept ‘gifts’ from TSR.
- Sherrie Dandan is willing to believe that all complaints stem from my blog ( which this did not ) despite Steve/TSR not providing proof that anyone connected with this blog sent it.
- Sherrie Dandan is willing believe, then go on to accuse this blog of being a ‘pirating site’ despite no pirated content being on this site, furthermore – I personally, until now, have paid for every game and expansion pack I own and have done since The Sims 1. It is false accusations such as this that make me, and other falsely accused players pay more attention to sites such as MOONSIMS or FREE SIMS STORE when looking for future content.
- Sherrie Dandan believes that because this site is hosted by someone who hosts another site that has ‘pirated’ store content submitted on his forum… that makes ME a pirate. That is like saying that everyone who has a blogger account with google are pirates because somewhere there is a blogger account that hosts pirated content…. That is beyond stupid.
- Sherrie Dandan believes Steve when he says that all my screencaps are edited and can be clearly seen with pixel zoom. Clearly Sherrie believes this on face value and has never once examined any of my screencaps to see that this is a blatent lie. She also believes the vast amount of the community and sites that supply information here do not exist because I made them up. Who does she think are buying the games?. Most screencaps come with a link to the site they are on and yet Sherrie believes I own all these sites too.
- Steve has supplied several ‘quotes’ from Coconut including “well I don’t care, I still think it was TSR so our accusation stands” and a ‘vow from me to bring down TSR because I was a failed FA’. Both quotes completely made up and with no truth to them whatsoever, but Sherrie has chosen to believe this with no links or proof that any of these ‘quotes’ where ever made outside of Steves imagination.
- Sherrie Dandan believes that followers of this blog were asking TSR members for their passwords despite NO ONE ever complaining this has EVER happened, nor any proof showing that any reader of this blog was involved. Why would they need a pass to TSR anyway? FA accounts are IP controlled meaning that unless you are using a computer in that FA’s house you can not access the account, and on the notion that all our readers are ‘pirates’ they wouldn’t need a subscriber account when the booty/ Sunset sims offers free TSR subscriber downloads with no account needed. No brainer really.
- Sherrie Dandan believes Steve when he says that a site that runs a business by manipulating EA made meshes and reselling the content against the EULA is a fansite. You can get full stolen games for free from the pirate bay… they must be superfans!
- Sherrie Dandan does not believe screencaps, witness statements, emails, complaints or Steves own contracting statements ( see myths and lies) only the word of one man(?) compared to the word of countless paying customers.
- Steve believes his job description …” I work for the Government in Criminal Justice” Sounds better than “I’m a prison guard”
- In all this we have learned that Steve is a liar, he will use any means to boast about his relationship with EA, TSR have once again hacked a childs account and that Sherrie Dandan is profoundly stupid.
- You have also learned to use other means of complaining to get your complaints heard in the right department and to state why you do not wish your complaints to go through a half wit who accepts bribes gifts from hackers.
- EA have left themselves wide open to legal action from the real complainant. Congratulations.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sadandan
Sherrie A. Dandan’s Experience
Community Manager – The Sims
Electronic Arts
Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; ERTS; Computer Games industry
March 2008– Present (4 years 4 months)
- Managing and growing The Sims community on TheSims3.com and TheSims2.com websites and social networks
- Synch with PR, Development team and Marketing to push game and content releases to community
- Distribute daily, weekly, and monthly reports on community outreach and growth
- Composing copy for news items and descriptions for virtual goods
- Organizing fan events
- Arranged accommodations, venues, services while staying within limited budgets
I can not find anywhere in her job description where it says she has the power to decide what is forwarded to EA legal and what is instead forwarded to hackers. Most companies have a policy that all communications mentioning legal action should be forwarded to the legal dept, I have not heard of any company who deem it ok to forward the complaint to friends/hackers and ridicule the complainant while hiding the complaint from the legal dept.
Sherrie Dandan - EA Mole
If anyone at EA believes these sceencaps are edited I will be happy to forward the original mails to anyone other than Sherrie Dandan, who already knows these are real.
UPDATE:
The person who did write the complaint to EA, and had her info shared with TSR by EA Mole Sherrie Dandan has now decided to take legal action.
http://tsr.mustbedestroyed.org/?p=1746
Hey Coconut, me and my friend have been ’stalking’ your blog for a while and we were thinking since you have so much evidence collected on here and obviously you have the original, uncensored emails and screenshots, why don’t you write to a newspaper? With this amount of data and evidence to support your cause someone is bound to publish it, and then the truth will have to come out. With that kind of publicity both EA and TSR will have to do something. Just a thought – but I think it would deal wonders. Plus proove Sherrie wrong about the screencaps and others being fake
Keep us updated, please! x
Reply: I am working on exactly that. With EA now being involved this makes the story a lot more interesting to the media. – Coconut
Comment by Kleo — June 23, 2012 @ 03:43
someone should speak with EA and demand to talk with sherrie, to me she is just an invention to make tsr look good.
Comment by Ailin — June 23, 2012 @ 05:41
Try the reviewers of games at both MSNBC and CNN as well as some of the other gamer websites. (Penny Arcade, Gizmodo are a couple that come to mind). It will be interesting to see how EA responds after this pile of you know what hits the fan.
Comment by Skoria_Bay — June 23, 2012 @ 05:55
I have to agree with Kleo. EA is already hated by most of the TS community and the game console community, and this would be the little “push” the people need to know what is really going on.
Comment by Me — June 23, 2012 @ 06:21
It surely sounds to me like there is something much more icky going on here between Sherrie and T$R. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if she gets a kickback in exchange for Damage Control. I don’t think we have seen the end of this, since I am equally sure that several people at EA read this very blog, (it isn’t that hard to find, really). One way or another, this WILL come back to bite both of them in the backside. I can’t wait to see the documentary on how Coconut helped bring down and evil, sick, corrupted bunch of pedo pervs.
Comment by Peter — June 23, 2012 @ 08:05
Wow! After reading this, any respect I had left for EA is gone.
Comment by Sarah — June 23, 2012 @ 14:00
Hohohohohoooo… uncovered a moll. I hope the complainants pounce on this. They most certainly have a case now.
Comment by Lol — June 23, 2012 @ 15:39
This is sick. First of all a grown man having inappropriate contact with an underage child needs to be reported to the authorities immediately. If I was mom and dad I’d be at the police. Best yet, since it is overseas, I would be in contact with a representative at the Embassy in whatever country this creep lives in. As for EA, this just makes me enraged. I allow my son who is 12 to play on my game sometimes and felt that since it was not an online game he was safe to play. But what I didn’t know was that I was allowing myself and my child to play a game created by a company that obviously supports a grown man’s inappropriate relationship with a young girl. My games are all getting destroyed today and I will never purchase another EA game. I am forwarding this link to my facebook page so that others will read this and hopefully follow suit. Coconut, if these people live in the US and you do as well, go over to Gawker. Consumerist.com was the blog that gave EA the Worst Company in America Award. I’d bet they would love to see those emails. EA gave consumerist a great response to their award and it is followed by a lot of people.
Reply: That is a wonderful idea! The consumerist site is under maintenance until Monday, but I will be in touch with them then. – Coconut
Comment by MIssT — June 23, 2012 @ 21:43
This whole thing just gets crazy and crazier. I might have an unpopular opinion but the girls initial message doesnt sit right with me. Maybe it’s a teen thing but who would sign off with love or kisses, it’s like waving a red flag to some weirdo creeps. Is there actually any evidence or has the girl actually shared that anything innapropriate had been said? I know the age thing is iffy but it’s not always perverted especially if they were discussing her hobby. That said if she felt she had to hide the messages either something was not right or she knew how her parents would react. I hope that the bigger lesson (how to be smarter online) isn’t lost amongst all the hacking etc.
Reply: I have the direct forwarded message, and it is genuine, however you are correct that there is no evidence or accusation that anything inappropriate
has been said. The point is that the girls mother wished the account to be deleted because she was not comfortable with the contact. TSR should have taken action to at least discuss the matter with her. Not initially ignore her, then blame her for a complaint she did not make and then go on to delete her account along with her EA account and other web accounts which are nothing to do with TSR. – Coconut
Comment by toxxic — June 24, 2012 @ 03:09
I want to be clear i’m not blaming the girl for anything, i just don’t want her to open herself up to trouble again! TSR defintely didn’t handle this properly and hopefully this will now blow up in their face. I totally understand the mother being uncomfortable with the contact, i guess i just think its sad that we’re in a world where we immediatley think the worst.
Comment by toxxic — June 25, 2012 @ 00:50
Does not surprise me in the least. EA has ignored all complaints about TSR from every quarter ever imagined.
They’re in the business of making money, not games. TSR is in the business of making money, not stuff. They’ve been sniffing each other’s butts forever. This set of emails does not even shock me.
A bunch of whores, is what this amounts to, and anyone who believes that either EA or TSR can be trusted with their money, info or other stuff should be warned that anyone reading this blog will be banned, too. (and I don’t care, either).
Telling the truth doesn’t seem to make anyone very happy at EA or TSR.
You should go ahead and publicize this any way you can. EA’s name can’t get much worse.
Comment by maryh — June 25, 2012 @ 02:37
I see the half ass end of an era. On both sides
Comment by Me — June 25, 2012 @ 08:52
It seems so insane that I wonder if this is some bullshit that TSR has been feeding to Coconut to advertise that they have ‘friends in high places’… but then again, why would Coconut fall for that.
Comment by Lol — June 25, 2012 @ 17:13
I’ve been ’stalking’ your blog for a while as well and it has certainly been entertaining to say the least. I’ve already been vastly disgusted with EA as a whole over several different issues, but to the players of the sims I have one thing to say. The initial man behind the sims left the EA company (if certain people are to be believed: over what EA was doing to his games). Don’t destroy your sims games because you are disgusted with EA. It isn’t taking back the money you paid them (or didn’t, if you were say a ‘pirate’ as TSR loves to accuse everyone here of) and you are depriving yourself of a truly great game.
Comment by Yuki — June 26, 2012 @ 04:45
And just when I thought my opinion of EA couldn’t get any lower.
LOL @ the way Steve goes into (self-)PR mode even when chatting to a friend “all we do is sell subscriptions for access to our premium content, which just happens to be the best and largest collection of Custom Content for the Sims games, made in the Sims 3 case by all our own software engineered in house but made freely available for any Sims fansite out there to use at will (Workshop)…” What a tard. Who on Earth talks like that?
Did you get in contact with Consumerist yet, coconut?
Louise: nothing is deleted from a hard disk until it’s overwritten. If you haven’t been able to retrieve the deleted files yourself, the best thing is to not use the laptop at all to save any data from being overwritten, and then get either the cops or a professional recovery service to retrieve the deleted data. The cops can actually do this really easily. Best wishes.
Comment by Silver Arrows — June 28, 2012 @ 20:05
I’d also tell mom and dad to check their bank/credit card statements for suspicious charges. Just on the off chance this creep was trying to con this girl into giving him money.
Comment by MissT — June 29, 2012 @ 00:57
Whoa, I finally ended reading this whole site!!!
The more I read, the more surprised I am. I never liked TSR (or paysites. The games are expensive enough. I don’t mind donate, but “buy”…) but now I officially HATE it.
I’ll follow you and your updates
BTW, I think you gave me something to work about when I finish my degree (I study law) XD
And about this particular topic… I think that mom did right when going to the police. Hope all has a happy ending ^-^ BTW, yesterday I couldn’t acces to TSR (looking for a sim, Google gives me a couple of places, one being TSR -.- I want that sim so badly I decided to check if it worth it) is still down?
Comment by Anouk — July 2, 2012 @ 07:31
I wonder what would happen if an attorney for a parent made a formal request regarding EA’s privacy policy to their legal department and referenced the disclosure of the personal information of their minor child to an unauthorized third party by an EA employee who in turn used it in a manner expressly forbidden by law…I believe, under US state and/or federal law EA incurs liability for the actions of their employees.
In other words, fuck Sherrie, demand satisfaction from her superiors.
Comment by Mia — July 2, 2012 @ 09:04
I just happened onto this site a couple of days ago when I googled why TSR was down. I think you need to find a way to get this site and info out for the majority to see. (As I know, I had NO IDEA.) All of this is beyond terrible and EA NEEDS to do something about it. I mean I realize EA isn’t affiliated with TSR but if a site/business is associating with their product (and it’s a website that large) and running unscrupulous business practices, EA should take notice and do SOMETHING. (However, I do realize that EA is probably the leader of scums of the earth, so this may just amuse them.) I just don’t know what to think. I have read over most of the pages here.. seen much of the evidence and I’m flabbergasted. As a decade long simmer and PAID subscriber for many years to TSR, I’m just saddened. I won’t be renewing my subscription. I’m changing all my emails/passwords today as the hacking has me frightened. (I’m not a creator but who knows… my email acct was hacked once and maybe they were just getting their jollies?) I will continue to follow the drama and I hope the PROGRESS on this very disturbing situation. Keep up the great work.
Comment by Ugh — July 3, 2012 @ 04:02
Just when I thought T$R couldn’t get any lower (or more disgusting) they go and prove me wrong. It truly disturbs me that Sherrie is okay with accepting “bribes” from T$R and giving out personal information. What a quality company, T$R & EA. And family friendly to boot! I can’t even put into words how frustrated and incredulous this news makes me!
Comment by Yo-yo's & Oreos — July 4, 2012 @ 08:29
I just wonder how you get all this information ?? Hard to imagine Steve or Sherrie sending willingly these e-mails for you… Do you have to hack their e-mails or something to find these infos?
I’m not trying to accuse you of anything, rather just I’d like to understand better.
I’m not into TSR and I 80% trust the info I get from this site, but it would be nice to have some explanation for this, even just short one…
Also, isn’t it crime to publish other people’s e-mails, so is it possible for you to take any legal action against them if you have also done crimes in this matter?
(sorry for being stupid)
Reply: Sorry for any confusion you may have.. No, neither Steve nor Sherrie sent these emails to me, if you re-read the article you will see that the emails between Sherrie and Steve were attached to a mail he sent to Louise, who forwarded them to me. I will try and recap for you, because I concede that it is rather confusing! Thomas was sending emails to a 13 year old girl, her mother, Louise, was not happy and she complained to Thomas, who ignored her. She threatened to contact the police. The next thing she knows is that Steve emails her, angry that EA had gotten a complaint he believed was from her ( although she made NO complaint to EA ) He forwards the emails from Sherrie to her to demonstrate that EA staff have a good relationship with TSR and that ‘her’ complaint never reached EA legal. In short, she got the blame for someone elses complaint. It was her who forwarded the emails to me.
Yes, I can legally print these as they were forwarded by Steve who told her to “pass this on to any other minion who might want to complain before putting their brain into gear” She passed them on with his written permission. Even without this permission the emails were still her property from the moment they arrived in her inbox. She sent them to me making them my property and in addition to this, she also gave me permission to publish them. Steve can try to sue me if he wishes, but then he would have a lot of explaining to do regarding his own genuinely illegal activities ( and EA would not be pleased with the media attention either! )
Every screencap shown here has been obtained legally, not because I see myself as a holier-than-thou saint and advocator of all things good, it is simply because I have no other way of obtaining them. -Coconut
Comment by Sacchara — July 4, 2012 @ 17:53
Thanks for explanation, I understand it now
I’m sure that helped someone else as well.
Comment by Sacchara — July 5, 2012 @ 15:06
It’s quite disgusting that Thomas is not willing to talk to the parents about his involvation with that 13 year old girl. I’d be furious and call the police, who WOULD investigate. In this day and age, people are actually prosecuted for internet crimes/child abuse/child anything/virtual harrassment etc. And yes, I have a 12 year old daughter and if I found out she was chatting to ANY older man privately, that person wouldn’t know what hit them. How Steve can put this off and not take this seriously, I really don’t know.
Comment by fairywitch — July 7, 2012 @ 07:33
I don’t understand. I cannot fathom how such people can go unnoticed by EA, by anybody, I don’t understand what this world has come to. A minor is “chatting” with an older individual and her mother requests for her account to be deleted and she gets a slap to the face. I came across this site years ago, and I just couldn’t believe any of it, even after all these years I’m still in shock. I was reading of Ravenia, I believe, and I’m disgusted, as to the reasoning of removing her status as FA. She quite clearly stated her cat was having problems, and they can’t ease up on her. I just can’t, but Coconut, stay safe, I don’t believe they take you lightly.
Comment by Ameriana — July 23, 2012 @ 16:22
XD @ putting in Sherrie’s photo!
Comment by Silver Arrows — October 13, 2012 @ 08:29
It would be really interesting to see this covered in the media, although I do not live in the U.S. so I probably won’t hear anything until you cover it, Coconut.
Unbelievable that they get away with this (both TSR and the people at EA who just sit and waggle their tails like a good puppy for TSR). I think I will play the original game for a while, Maxis wasn’t perfect either but they seemed a lot friendlier towards the community. A lot funnier too.
Comment by Sarol — November 24, 2012 @ 04:59
this unbelievable because THAT’S MY COMPLAINT I MADE TO EA AND MY IP ADDRESS THAT I HAVE SINCE CHANGED
Comment by Sharmesha — November 26, 2012 @ 17:31
DAN THE MAN needs to be fired or demoted to games tester, EA need more game testers and less of butch bitches giving our info to hackers.
Comment by Marley — November 29, 2012 @ 00:12
Is it just me or… does it sound like he bought her a sex toy? O_O
Comment by Lauren — January 2, 2013 @ 21:44