Greetings friends,

It is with a heavy heart that I am finally approaching you with some information that has been a long time coming. Some of you may have guessed what that info is. Or perhaps you didn't. I am finally going to download to you three the situation surrounding... Chris.

Before I get into anything, I want to explain why I am sharing this with you all, and why I waited so long. For months, I've been biting my tongue, trying to keep as much to myself as possible, to keep all of this from being gossip. But as new developments have come about and through fervent prayer (plus parental advice), I have realized that I cannot keep this to myself any longer. Why? Matthew 18.

"And if your brother sins against you, go show him his fault between you and him alone. If he hears you, you gained your brother. But if he does not hear, take with you one or two more, so that BY THE MOUTH OF TWO WITNESSES, OR THREE, EVERY WORD WILL STAND. And if he does not hear them, then say it to the Called-Forth [ekklesia, "church"]. And if he also does not hear the Called-Forth, then let him be to you as the foreigner and the tax-gatherer." Matthew 18:15-17

I confronted Chris privately. He did not hear me. I spoke with two others about it, who both confronted him. He did not hear them. Now, I am saying it to the CHT admins--CHT is our community, and the one he has sinned against. I would bring it before the entire CHT, but I am not confident it would be appropriate, especially since so many of the members are young. So my "Called-Forth" is the Admins.

So please take note, it is not my intention to shame Chris or to tarnish his reputation (though it may be a result). I am following Matthew 18, so I am telling you this so that we can confront him one last time, in a unified fashion. I hope and pray that he will hear us. Once you are all up to speed, we can discuss the best way to approach him, but please do not do it individually--I feel that would defeat the purpose. Wait until we have all agreed.

And of course, please do not share any of the information below with another member of CHT. And now, let's get into it.

Early in Oct. 2017, someone who shall remain anonymous contacted me. Anon had noticed some concerning patterns in Chris's live play, and wanted me to look into it. I came to this issue as a Moderator, and on first review, things seemed slightly fishy, but I wanted to give Chris the benefit of the doubt. I went to @MGleason, looking to vindicate him. Unfortunately, what Michael discovered was far worse than I had expected. I asked him to write up an explanation, so you all can understand and even see for yourself:

MGleason wrote:

I first became aware of an issue with @ChristopherBTrapper in June 2017, when I learned that he had been running multiple accounts. I did not pay any attention to the details at that time, and since staff were aware, I assumed it was probably not a major issue and had been resolved. I did not pay any attention to any details at the time, and did not at that point learn what the other accounts were.

In October 2017, someone observed him playing games against accounts with names such as @Danny2nd, @BlehblehHaha, and @WooglyPawn, and confronted him about this. Chris denied that it was him; shortly thereafter closed his own account, while the other person reported it to @ijgeoffrey, who shared it with me and with staff.

On investigation, I determined the following, primarily from information (such as game history) that anyone can access. Additional information only available to moderators and staff confirmed it, although the game history was more than sufficient confirmation for most of it.

1. He had been using multiple accounts for purposes of rating manipulation through a series of rigged games over a course of many months or longer.
2. These accounts included @Danny2nd, @BlehblehHaha, @WooglyPawn, @swooshoosh, @Skits4ev, @YuDarv, @TheNextTomBrady, @BlobleGambit, @CheckerDoof, @SashMove4, @CollapsiblePawn, @PazterStinker, @BasiliskChess, @siglaisses, @FirstLoser2, @SwedishLoser3, @PipiMath, @TopolovTheWorld, @Josik4k4, @AmericanAuthBest, @JulianAlec, @DodgingSwinger, @ScarsToYourBeautiful, @DOWNTOUCH, and more.
3. I stopped following the chain at that point, but it appeared to keep going, and at that point I was already back to January 2017. Since this was discovered in October, this means I had documented rating manipulation going back at least nine months.
4. January 2017 is also the time when his bullet rating shot up from a stable ~1600ish where it had been for a year to 2000+, hitting a peak of over 2400 in March 2017. It was obvious where at least part of the improvement came from, although playing in the highly-volatile 10-second pool was also a factor for part of the time (staff later made changes to reduce the rating impact of 10-second games).

When this was discovered and he was confronted, he closed his account and opened a new one (he has also closed that one now, and has another that I believe he has mostly kept anonymous. If anyone does not know his current identity on the site, I won't reveal it for now.

By rating manipulation, I mean using multiple accounts playing rigged games against each other. People occasionally do this using a series of accounts over a few hours to reach ratings of 3000 and above (another example, unconnected with Chris, would be @soxuyi, who won rigged games over @widayu, who won rigged games over @kosayan, etc.). Chris got away with it for so long because he didn't push as high. Instead, he stayed in the low 2000s over a period of many months.

The rating manipulation was mostly easy to identify, although there was a clear attempt to hide it. For example, look at @TheNextTomBrady's game archive: he plays a few legitimate games, but he also has a series of obviously rigged games over @CheckerDoof (one of his other accounts). @TheNextTomBrady then loses a series of games to @ChristopherBtrapper; many of these look like legitimate games, although there's a few obvious blunders. @TheNextTomBrady then loses a bunch of obviously rigged games to @BlobleGambit. @BlobleGambit then loses a whole bunch of games to @ChristopherBtrapper, most of which look like legitimate games, and then loses a bunch of obviously rigged games to @Skits4ev. @Skits4ev then loses a bunch of legitimate-looking games to @ChristopherBtrapper, before losing a bunch of obviously-rigged games to @swooshoosh and @YuDarv.

After following a bunch of accounts, the pattern becomes very clear:
1. He would create an account.
2. He would make this account play a bunch of rigged games against another account to boost its rating. There may or may not also be a small number of legitimate games against other people.
3. He would play a bunch of legitimate-looking games against @ChristopherBtrapper with this account; @ChristopherBtrapper would win nearly all the games. Based on the length of the games, the time control, and the fact that he occasionally lost, it's highly likely he had an accomplice for this step; probably someone who is below his level but not a complete rookie. I don't know for certain who this accomplice was, although I have a guess.
4. The account would then lose a bunch more games to the next account in the chain to boost its rating.

Doing this made sure the games at the @ChristopherBtrapper account all looked like legitimate games. There's nothing suspicious about having a series of reasonable-looking games, most of which you win, against another person, so anyone who looked at his game archive would not see anything suspicious. But if you look at all the other games at those accounts, the pattern becomes clear. And additional information only available to mods and staff provides confirmation that he's behind all those accounts.

This is obviously a violation of chess.com rules. If he had not closed his own account first, it would have been banned with either a fair play or an abuse label (I've seen both used for rating manipulation).

With this info, which to me was undoubtable, I confronted Chris. Much to my disappointment, he refused to admit it, claiming that he had done nothing wrong. It was about this time that I banned him from CHT. I did not want a habitual cheater (which is a type of liar) in the group, much less as an admin. This was, however, never intended to be permanent--only to last until he confessed and apologized.

I continued to correspond with Chris, and he gave me bogus excuses. Shortly thereafter, his brother got involved, telling me to lay off Chris and that he had done nothing wrong. He gave me the beginnings of an "explanation" which Chris had as yet been unwilling to give. This opened the floodgates, and Chris started "explaining" everything to me. The stories often contradict and either way are completely ridiculous, but I will attempt to represent it. (These will be summaries, not quotes.)

Chris's explanation: Initially, "I never played against myself to give myself points. I made some accounts for friends who wanted to play me, and always had a fair fight. The IP addresses match mine, but they weren't me, just my friends. You can't know everything." (BTW, I never mentioned IP to him.) "If I really did something wrong, I didn't know, but people hate me now. I won't be talking to anyone on chess.com anymore." (Also not true.)

His brother told me, "Leave Chris alone. I opened those accounts and played him. I wanted to get him super high so that he could them play me and lose, so that I would have a better best win. He promised not to tell anyone so that's why he wouldn't explain. I only am contacting you because he left his email open the other day and I saw it." (Notice that this doesn't cope with the original story. Who opened the accounts, Chris or Ben?)

Chris after this: "Ben made all the accounts. I told him he shouldn't but I'm not his dad. He wanted to play me with them, and I said only if he played the games out with me. But he started getting tired of playing them and resigning early. I got caught up in the moment and didn't stop him." (Exact quote coming now--pay attention: ) "I know that was wrong and I talked about it with him. He won’t do it again and I won’t do it again. I Made him close all the accounts and tell you." (Chris made Ben tell me?? I thought Ben just saw his email open?)

This was the last message I received from Chris. It came close to an apology, so I was hopeful that I had broken through. But he never responded to my next email. No apology ever came.

The fact is that even if this bizarre, unbelievable story of Ben making the accounts to benefit himself is true, Chris still lied to me somewhere. And believe me, this is the cliff notes version of our conversation. I left out plenty of minor lies and insults, which I received over the course of a full week.

While I was still in the middle of this confrontation with Chris (which turned very nasty on his part, stern on my part, and frankly I'm looking forward to forgetting), apparently Chris decided to talk to Kate about it (though he had requested I not tell anyone anything!). Kate ultimately asked me for my side. Not knowing how much Chris had told her, I simply gave her the evidence, similar to how Michael put it forth, and she could see what happened. I know that she ultimately confronted Chris on it. I do not know how it went, if he apologized, or any details at all. All I know is I never received an apology from Chris. So I know that whatever he may have said to her, it didn't change his heart. In fact, he was mad that I gave Kate any info. I told him it was only because he had already talked to her about it, and he told me "I told her some. I did not tell her everything yet. I’m trying to be careful dude." To this day I'm not sure how to take this comment. It's almost an admission of his manipulation of the facts. But maybe I'm reading into it.

Anyway, Kate was the first witness, and it didn't go well. For a long time, I heard nothing from Chris. Ben actually apologized to me for his part in the situation, so he remained in CHT for a while. And so the situation went on the back-burner.

Fast-forward to January. CHT receives a suspicious application. I look around and find evidence, leaving me 100% sure this is Chris. I devise a test. I treat him like I would any normal applicant, and send him the application form. I wanted to see if he was going to lie to me again. And how does he respond?

He fills out the form, barely. He leaves off almost all important information, such as age (even though that's a required question!), do you know anyone in CHT, is this your first account, and where do you live. He gives me a name: Chris Harding. Why did he want to join CHT? "well it looks like the most active homeschool group i looked at others but it had less than half the members."

That's NOT his name! That's NOT why he wants to join! Even leaving off most of the incriminating evidence, he still managed to lie to me. So I called him out, with a simple two-sentence reply, and then denied his application. I had decided in my heart (and actually discussed with my mom, so she can vouch that I said this) that this would be my litmus test to see if Chris had changed, and that if he lied on that form, I would make his ban permanent. Guess what: he lied.

Chris's explanation: Though I did not correspond with Chris after this event, I did receive one message from him. In my brief message, I "thanked" him for trying to deceive me. His response was "Nah bro I knew you would know. I did not wish everyone knowing. I’m only here to prepare for my tournaments."

Ok, let's break this down. I actually PMed him the application form. If he knew I would know, why didn't he just tell me?! It's not like he had to include it on the form. "I did not wish everyone knowing." Made no sense at the time, but read on for that. "I'm only here to prepare for my tournaments." BALONEY. (a), that contradicts what he put on the form, and (b), a social group that he knows has almost nothing to do with chess will not help him prepare for anything!

Now, apparently, since I didn't ever respond to Chris, he decided to talk with Ben about it, who of course dashed to his rescue by attacking me over message. He tells me that he asked Chris to join, so that he could help us with one of our TMs. (Oh look, this is now the THIRD contradicting explanation for why Chris would join.) The "everyone knowing" thing was apparently because Chris remembered that Drew and Matt have access to the application forms (which even I had forgotten). But that doesn't really change anything, because he still could have told me.

According to Ben, apparently "Chris Harding" wasn't a lie because that's his nickname. And playing in the TM is a way of prepping for tournaments, so that isn't a lie either. (Apparently Chris also told Ben that I had blocked him, which wasn't true. This might not be a lie, if Chris got a strange error. But who knows at this point.)

Whatever. It frankly doesn't matter to me if these are cold-cut, factual lies (which they could be). Bending the truth is still lying. And since Ben keeps coming to his defense, and admitting his own participation, I decided it would be better off to ban Ben too (which I think comes into play a little later).

After this situation, I got a little worried again. I thought Chris would move on and let it go, but now here he is months later, trying to sneak back in past my watchful eye. And frankly, I can only list God as the reason I figured out this was Chris at all. I was worried. So I redoubled my vigilance and kept an active watch, to see what he might do next. I also did a little digging, and what I eventually discovered was shocking (though to be honest, I had wondered about it for quite some time).

Begin scene 3. In February, through means that I am not at liberty to discuss, Chris was discovered logging into the account of @supssabra. In case you do not remember who Sabra is, she joined CHT a long time ago, as one of Chris's friends from VPSA. Now, there are two explanations I can think of: "Sabra" was always Chris, or he actually logged into her account. Some internet research seems to back up the identity of Sabra as real, so I'm going to assume that the second explanation is the real one.

I brought Michael in on this one--I did not want to contact Chris directly again. Michael got in touch with him. His explanation of what happened? "I logged in a few times with her permission lately (she never uses it anyway) to check to see what was up with someone because they weren’t answering my texts." Ok sure, she gave him her password, so he could spy on someone. Not a good thing to be doing (actually, it's against site rules). You all can decide if you fully believe this story, but I highly doubt that he is honest about his motivation. I believe that Chris was checking in on CHT periodically, using his brother's account. When I banned his brother, I cut him off, so he started using Sabra's account to spy on us. That explanation makes far more sense to me.

MGleason wrote:

[Chris] was recently using @supssabra, which I believe was likely a legitimate account originally created by someone else who shared the password with him (which is a violation of the rule against shared accounts) to spy on the CHT. He said he didn't know that was against the rules; I don't entirely buy that, but even if he didn't know using someone else's account is against the rules, there's an obvious moral problem with using another account to spy on people.

Oh, did you think I was done? Sorry everybody: the worst is yet to come. At the same time that I found Chris was using Sabra's account, I noticed something else highly suspicious. I did some digging. I found solid proof that starting in May of 2016, Chris created at least 11 different accounts impersonating teenage girls. Many of them, he claimed were his "friends", and he used them in CHT. Do you remember @malikackung / @SarahChen? That was Chris. @TayTayl? Also him. Melea (@Algebra2000 / @Biologyexpert99) was him. @DeeFan was him. @Smilygirl / @Frownygirl was him. (All of this is 100% verifiable, but I am moderatorially-bound not to share the evidence. @MGleason, though, is fully-informed, and will witness to this being true.)

Please tell me you all are as upset by this as I am. All the public and private interactions, with him pretending to be a girl, speaking to his friends who trust him, and they completely unaware. The thought of it sickens me.

Now, without my prompting, Michael confronted Chris with this info too. I was stunned to discover that unlike in previous altercations, he did not actually deny this. Granted, he didn't admit anything either. He made a veiled remark to shift the blame, which is far less than he had done earlier on other things. The full text of his response (as pertains to this specific allegation) is as follows: "I know some of what you are talking about, but keep in mind I have nine siblings most of whom were/are on chess.com at some point."

Chris actively participated in each one of these accounts entering CHT. He was in charge of applications at the time, and so he was his own gatekeeper. In almost every one of these cases, he actually claimed to know the "girl." I refuse to believe that this was one of his siblings and he knew nothing about it. It doesn't add up.

Plus, with Melea, there was also matter of the "hacking." For those who may not know or remember, "Melea" claimed that she was able to hack people accounts--that it wasn't that hard. To prove it, she "hacked" Chris's account and posted from it. Of course, this is no small feat if both of them were Chris! CHT went into an uproar, with many people openly saying that Melea might be Chris. They demanded to see a bullet game played between the two of them. Not only did Chris refuse this, but somehow, using both accounts, he managed to sweet-talk his way out of the whole thing, and get everyone to relent and to forget it all. I still don't know how he managed it.

(And if you want to pile on even more, @malikackung was banned for cheating. So Chris cheated with that account.)

There you all have it. I know I just dumped a ton on you, and it's ok if you take a little bit to process. For me, the most recent discovery (the one that actually started longest ago) is the most revolting and concerning, and makes me glad that I did decide to ban him when I did. And the fact that he keeps trying to get back in to CHT concerns me all the more.

I know that for some of you, Chris is a friend. I know you've known him for a long time. But the reality of the internet is that sometimes, some people lie. Chris told some whoppers. You guys need to see Chris for what he is.

Chris is a believer. And he is a believer in sin. He has not heeded reproof from me, or from Kate, or from Michael (who actually confronted him on all of this, not only the most recent stuff). It's time for us, the Admins, to unify on the issue. We haven't done that yet. Chris is banned from CHT, yet he is still mentioned often, he is still in the CHT Skype group, and who knows what else. Our resolve needs to be one.

Now, I'm not saying "Do as I command" here. I want us all to discuss this situation together, and decide where to go from here. One idea I had was for us to all author and sign a letter to him, confronting him on all he has done. We would also need to decide together what to do after that. He could respond positively or negatively, and in either case we need a plan for how to move forward.

I have two concerns in this situation. First, I don't want to see Chris continue down this path. That's why I'm taking a Matthew 18 approach. I want to see him restored. I want to see him repent. Even if the end result is a full ban from all things CHT, and a total cutting off of contact with him by all of us, Scripturally, that is a valid course of action, and can even lead to eventual restoration.

But my other concern is also the one that weighs even more heavily on my mind: The safety of the members of CHT. Chris has shown the propensity to readily lie to benefit himself, to lie to get what he wants, and to lie God-only-knows-why (in the case of the impersonation of teenage girls). This worries me. CHT is made up primarily of children, many of whom are quite young indeed. As admins, we must do our utmost to protect them from potential threats. It's hard to believe, I know, but a guy who pretends to be teenage girls to infiltrate a group of children and form "friendships" with them--that is a potential threat. That's why I banned him. That's why he is still banned. And I hope you all can understand that.

Ok, I'm done talking now. Take all the time you need to process. Whenever you're ready, please start discussing below. If you need to talk to me privately first, I'm available.

I'm sorry to burden you all with this.

Cap's Correspondence Chess Club

Super Admins