I am asking for help. People are telling lies about me on Couch Surfing (CS). Please go there & tell them to stop it. I need your help.
Please email the staff of CS.
They are committing crimes against me. It must stop. Here is a link to a thread on CS that is saying horrible things about me. It is saying many things that are very inaccurate.
Click this link here:
https://www.couchsurfing.org/n/threads/ho-chi-minh-city-ho-chi-minh-city-vietnam-please-do-not-comment-on-this-post-no-fighting-please-no-foul-language-please-this-post-is-merely-to-inform-cs-membe
Dear fellow Couchsurfing members,
As you might have noticed (it was actually pretty hard not to notice it), a person has persistently been spamming our Saigon CS forum over the last few weeks/months and has been creating numerous fake profiles: He calls himself Joey Arnold, The Original Oatmeal, Dan Henderson, Bob Max, Kim Freeman and he has probably been using several other names.
One of our trustworthy Saigon Couchsurfing members (Tram Pham) has actually seen his passport, so we know his real name, which is Joey Arnold, born 1985.
We want to advise the community to stay away from this individual. Please do not support him or encourage him to spread his nonsense on this website/forum. Please completely ignore him and his posts and don't reply to his posts. He cannot be considered trustworthy (otherwise, why would a person continuously create fake profiles?). It is clearly against the guidelines and rules of Couchsurfing to create several profiles with different names to purposely delude other members. And it is also clearly against the rules and guidelines to spam this forum with nonsensical messages. With his reckless behaviour and disregard of these rules he is clearly threatening the safety and well-being of other CS members and is undermining the CS security system. Couchsurfing headquarters keep deleting his fake profiles, as they also consider him a security threat, but so far Joey Arnold has simply continued to create new fake profiles with new fake names. This behaviour can not be tolerated as it is threatening the safety of other CS members.
Please be wary when replying to posts which were created by people with empty profiles (that means no profile picture, no profile information given, no references, no vouches, etc.). It might be Joey or some other creep who is trying to trick you into believing that he is somebody who he is actually not. Of course, when you are a new member of Couchsurfing, you will not have any references yet and nobody will have vouched for you yet. But it should go without saying that you should provide the community with some information about yourself with which you can earn their trust. After all, this is a website and community which is build on trust, so the least that members can do is to provide some information about themselves to earn the trust of other members. So I'm urging you: Please fill out your profiles completely! Don't take the trust of this community for granted, but please understand that you also have to make an effort to make this community work!
My apologies for such a long message, but we consider it especially important to inform new members of CS of this current "Joey"-situation and to help them to use this great website safely and with care.
We will re-post this message on a regular basis to inform new CS members about this security threat and to ensure the safety of new CS members who haven't made the acquaintance of "Joey" yet.
PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS POST! THIS WAS POSTED ONLY TO INFORM PEOPLE!
I have also written a message to Allie of the CS Trust and Safety Team (see below). In her reply she is also very clear that it is NOT OKAY to have several fake profiles on this website!
Here her reply to me:
Hello Björn,
Thank you for contacting us. I'm sorry to hear that this issue persists.
Firstly, thank you for creating this post, and for caring about the safety of the community.
Creating duplicate profiles is definitely against our Terms of Use. We will take action against any new profiles that this member creates, once discovered.
Please do report any duplicate profiles to us so we can review. It would be helpful if you could encourage other members to do so as well. It's best to report to us directly before engaging with the abusive member, as we are empowered to take further actions.
Have you met this member in person? If so, do you have reason to believe that he is a dangerous individual? You mentioned that other members have had negative offline experiences with Joey. Can you please encourage them to contact us directly to let us know what happened?
Again, thank you for reporting this. I do hope that this issue gets resolved.
Looking forward to hearing back from you.
Warm regards,
Allie
Trust and Safety Team
Couchsurfing