Back in early 2009, Party 934 gave me a slot on their radio station, which became The Phone Show. Almost immediately, a group of guys known as “pbx411″ started calling into the show only to scream their URL at us and hang up. It turned out that they completely hated me and linear, for reasons unknown, and made it their life’s mission to ruin The Phone Show. They set up a bunch of fake Craigslist ads with the show’s phone number, which gave us fun content for the show and has become a tradition for us since then, and they constantly called in to tell us their URL. They claimed complete victory in their war against the PLA when they found RogueClown’s phone number and sent a pizza to her house. Just slightly over a month later, their campaign of terror was over, and linear and I were able to sleep peacefully again.

Of course, I can’t complain too much about a group of guys who call up a show and yell a single phrase at the host. Our phone mobs against AM radio stations were mostly people calling in and working the word “cactus” into some form of weird joke that only PLA people would understand. If anything, I deserve to be harassed on my own show, but they should at least have put a little more effort into it than simply yelling their URL and hanging up. People wouldn’t still be listening to our old What’s Your Bid prank every day if all we did was call them up and yell, “PHONELOSERS DOT ORG!#!@##!@” at them.

So pbx411 disappeared for a couple of years as their domain name expired and disappeared as well. But then, just a month ago, they came back! This time they had a new domain name, called phonewinners.com (get it? because they’re not losers like us!), and a renewed irrational hatred for all things PLA. The campaign of phone calls started up once again, only this time they were yelling “PHONEWINNERS DOT COM!!!” at us instead of “PBX411 DOT INFO!!!”. They did the same to OhEmGee’s Fun Show and they began spamming the Fruit Wall on phonelosers.org with their URL nonstop. They seemed completely desperate to make their URL known, something that most people accomplish by simply asking me to post their link on the page for them.

So why do the Phone Winners hate me so much? This is best part – apparently it’s because I deleted a post of Harry’s (he’s the head Phone Winner) on the PLA forums years ago. That’s it. I deleted a post. I haven’t been told which post I deleted and I don’t even know if it was me that deleted it or one of the other mods there. The only thing I’m certain of is that a deleted post from more than 2 years ago isn’t worth this much time and energy. If you’re still seething with hatred after 2 years just because some post was deleted, then you have some issues. But if you’re dedicating a large portion of your day to harassing the guy who runs these forums, then…I dunno. That’s just weird. Pretty much every time we’ve called into their voice bridge, they 2 guys on it are ranting about what a horrible person I am. For deleting a post.

Stuff like this happens to me all the time, of course. Harry and the Phone Winners are just the latest in the harassment that’s taken place against me during the past 15 years of doing PLA. There’s always some guy that makes it his life’s mission to bring me down forever, usually for no reason at all and usually someone who thinks he’s completely anonymous and that I can never do anything about it. This thing with Harry mostly reminds me of the StLSD2000 incident from about 10 years ago, where a guy named StLSD2000 decided that I was the most evil person in the world because I banned the use of numbers on the PLA Forums in an attempt to stomp out the problem with people posting credit card and calling card numbers there. StLSD2000 began calling me at home and charging items to my phone bill, certain that he would bankrupt me and that my life would be over. When I promised him that I would post the calling cards he sent me on phonelosers.org, he was really surprised to find out that not only did I figure out who he was, but that I posted all of his personal information on phonelosers.org along with the calling cards. I don’t think I ever heard from him after that.

The best course of action for people like this has always been to just completely ignore them. They quickly get bored and go away, usually forever, but some of them keep at it until I figure out who they are. Like z09, a person that a lot of you probably remember from the PLA Forums, who began stealing my account info from local businesses like Blockbuster and sending me pizzas and mailing spoiled food to my PO box. He disappeared forever after I tracked him down and changed his forum avatar into his boy scout photo. Or Compudroid, who hacked my site and was tricking everyone into dialing his ANI trap until I gave all of those people his home phone number, or Brice Carlson who dared the PLA to harass him and then began calling the police on me when I complied, or Jason H after he tried to get my sites taken down. And, of course, there’s that little incident where Richard Cardo tried to frame me for a high-profile murder case.

Lately the Phone Winners have graduated from harassing me online to posting the personal information of PLA people on their site, threatening to assault me at Defcon this summer, calling my hosting company to social engineer MySQL info from them, and attempting to run up the bandwidth limit on my Cacti Radio host so that I’m charged an extra $10 per month, an expense that I just don’t see how I’m going to be able to ever afford. Don’t worry, they haven’t even come close to reaching my limit yet, but they are still trying their best and I’m extremely worried about this. The funny thing is, Harry doesn’t seem to know much about proxies, because while the logs on my website showed that he was using a free proxy service called sslbrowser.com to access my web site, they still displayed his real Comcast IP address in New Jersey.

So yesterday I called Comcast and asked, “Hey, Comcast, who does this IP address belong to?” and they’re like, “LOL, it belongs to some girl named Deborah Garretson at 85 Booraem Ave, Unit B, in Jersey City.” And I said, “Oh? Well what’s Deborah’s phone number?” and Comcast says, “It looks like the same Google Voice number that Harry used when he registered voipwin.com.” This was exactly the moment that I began spending a large chunk of my work day researching Harry’s home. I was able to find out that Harry’s real name is Joseph W Princiotta Jr and that although Harry loves bragging about making $3,000 IN CASH for making a single service call, he still can’t seem to scrounge up enough money to move out of his mother’s house. Yep, Harry is 44-years-old and still lives with his mom, Loretta. Hasn’t moved out yet. That’s gotta be hell on his dating life.

And it turns out that Harry is a huge internet celebrity too, featured on FARK.com for nearly blowing his hand off and sending some other guy to the hospital. So Harry is 44, still lives with his mom, enjoys civil war reenactment shows, and is dumb enough to set fire to tubes of gun powder in his hand. And, oh yeah, he doesn’t know how to use a proxy.

So now I just feel kind of bad for Joe and that’s why I’m giving him the attention that he’s been so desperate for all these years. Visit his website at phonewinners.com, where he’s put a ton of effort into bashing the PLA because he hates us, yet he’s been stealing all of our pranks and reposting them on his site. Don’t write anything hateful in the comments section, though, because even though Harry will flip out and harass you for 2 years when you delete a forum post of his, he will still delete your comments if they hurt his feelings.

Call up Harry’s voice bridge at 212-389-1318 and talk to him and his life partner, Joseph Moskalshi in Easton, Pennsylvania, who pays for the web site and helps Harry call into the show and scream their URL at us every Tuesday and Wednesday night. Once you tire of listening to The Joes complain about me all day, you should hang up and join the 21st century by hanging out with PLA on Tinychat or Skype.

Harry, please accept my apologies for deleting whatever forum post of yours that I deleted 2 years ago and please don’t throw a bag of piss on me at Defcon for that heinous crime. If you want to join the forums and post it again, I’ll let you. I sincerely hope that you appreciate that I’ve finally posted your URL on phonelosers.org and that you’ll stop trying to run up my bandwidth bill at PRQ, because if you manage to succeed, they’re going to charge me an extra $10 and that will totally ruin my life forever. I make very little profit from selling PLA dog tags and I honestly don’t think I can sell enough dog tags to cover the expense that your hacking may end up costing me. Please stop refreshing my page. Please! Oh, and test out free proxy services before you use them.