WHERE ARE THE DUBROOM MESSAGE BOARDS?
DUBROOM IN-SITE 14
WWW, February 8/9, 2009 - The Dubroom Messageboards were offline again, during the last days. As the hosting company xsorbit could not be reached, some research was done and some disturbing information was revealed.
Did xsorbit's CEO flee his country after being wanted by the police?
Last weekend, it happened again: the Dubroom Message Boards went offline. A rather irritating situation for many reasons. Sure, there can be outages here and there, but since the Dubroom actually pays the xsorbit company, a certain amount of quality can and should be expected.
During these outages, I always try to contact xsorbit to check out what's the matter. I did so a couple of weeks ago, too, when instead of the Dubroom messageboard the browser displayed a "Go Daddy" page.
"Go Daddy" is a company that buys up expired domains and gives the owner of the website, or others, to take over the domain. An example of a Go Daddy page can be found if you go to www.xsorbit31.com.
As you can see, the site reads "NOTICE: This domain name expired on 01/23/2009 and is pending renewal or deletion". When I saw this after wanting to see the Dubroom Message Boards, you can imagine that I was pretty upset and I wrote to customer service.
No response.
Now, I can't even write to xsorbit customer service as all their websites are down. So I did a little bit of research on the Internet and discovered, that the guy who runs xsorbit probably fled his country because of some fraud issues.
Before that, though, I saw an enormous amounts of complaints when I did a simple Google search for "xsorbit". I saw, that many of these complaints were pretty recent, even this year.
Take this one, dated January 27, 2009. Someone who runs a US Veterans board, complains about the outages. He says they do not even return phone calls. It triggered a whole flood of complaints by others as well.
One person said, he was going to file a complaint to the "BBB", a watchdog for the business and charity organizations. Their ratings of the xsorbit company are extremely low, in fact they are the lowest one can get as company or a charity organization. According to the BBB:
Reasons for this rating include: Failure to obtain a required competency license. Length of time business has been operating. Failure to respond to complaints filed against this business. BBB does not have sufficient background information on this business. (SOURCE)
Further reading of the list of complaints revealed a rather troubling piece of information, which, if true, could lead to the possibility that the Dubroom Message Boards will stay off-line. It could very well be, namely, that the guy who runs xsorbit fled the USA because of some mortgage fraud.
According to the Mortgage Fraud website, a site by the American Mortgage Law Group, we can read how someone was arrested because of come complicated fraud issue. The guy was not alone, there are two more wanted by the police. According to the website:
Two additional defendants are still at large with warrants issued for their arrest. Paula Luna is believed to be in California and Michael Sinclair is believed to have fled to the Philippines. (SOURCE)
I discovered the source of this allegation. It can be found on a Yahoo Answers web page. Someone asks about the xsorbit outages, and another one responds. He/she writes:
think their CEO Michael Sinclair fled the country before December 11 due to being charged with mortgage fraud:
I think it's the same Michael Sinclair of Las Vegas Nevada due to the Philippines connection mentioned in the article (xsorbit also mentioned having an office in the Philippines). (SOURCE)
Michael Sinclair, Las Vegas, and the Philippines. The Philippines also have an xsorbit department, where the founder of xsorbit is a guy called Michael Sinclair.
Now, obviously, we cannot say for sure if this is the Michael Sinclair that runs xsorbit. But we can say, that the amounts of complaints about the company are many and they are growing in recent times especially.
As for now, I will definitely look into other ways of having the Dubroom Message Boards continue. Until now, I was more or less bound to xsorbit because of the enormous wealth of postings going back many years. I would hate to see that go into the memory hole...
With messageboards that simply vanish, domains which expire and allegations of a CEO fleeing the country because of mortgage frauds, I think I have enough hints to start looking for other ways.
I hope, that this episode of Dubroom Online will also help those that like to visit and/or post to the Message Board and are wondering what's going on.
One Love, Give Thanks,
Messian Dread.
