Owners who pose as two owners

[db23]

Hey everybody. I wanted to post something in here about an issue that some of us may have encountered. In my league right now I have reason to believe than an owner is posing as two owners. During the offseason I conduct business on a proboards message board and you can monitor ip addresses to see if people are logging on from the same place-to figure out if owners are posing as two owners.

Unfortunately, it looks like an owner is in fact posing as two people. The separate accounts come from the same ip address. And, the one owner who has been in my baseball league for a few years now got his "friend" into this league. He claims they work together and has even stated that they'll be unable to participate in the minor league draft we run on the message board until night time since they work together all day. I didn't think anything of it until I did a random check today to look at the ip addresses of the members of the message board. Then, I noticed this owner and "his friend' had the same exact ip address. The original owner seemed like a trustworthy fellow. This is the third year he'll be in my baseball league and he has been a member of my football league for two years now. I don't know him personally though as I live in Pennsyvlania and he claims he's from Canada.

I notified the co-commish of my league about this and took a screenshot of both profiles with the same ip addresses. How should I proceed? Do you guys think I should boot both owners or first get an explanation? Or, am I being too paranoid? I wanted to put this out there and get some unbiased opinions. Thanks.

Dennis

[Trainer of Dolphins]

could be they are in college and live together or something


I would keep an eye out for suspicious activity tho still

[lsommerer]

If they work together and are posting from work then you would expect them to have the same IP address. They might also share the same IP address if they were in the same apartment building or (as has been said) go to the same school.

The problem isn't really that they might be the same person (though it is dishonest). The problem is that they might act in a collusionary manner. You might have the same problem with two people in the same family, or just two random people. Make sure you have rules to handle situations like that and you should be okay.

Having said that, I would do a traceroute on the IP address and at least see if they are honest about their location. Here's a good one:

http://whatismyipaddress.com/staticpage ... traceroute

[Rich Greene]

I wouldn't worry about it. I've had to share a computer with other owners many times and all that actually leads to is the opposite of collusion- becoming super competitive and rivals. You said yourself he seemed like an honest fellow.

[aplviper]

As long as no ridiculous trades or obviously collusive behavior occurs, I don't really see the harm in it. I have actually had two teams in a league before and found that I enjoyed the challenge of drafting and maintaining two good teams. The only difference in my case is that the other owners knew that I had the two teams, and it was done to fill the league at the last minute.

[talan37]

I am not a big fan of this situation. I feel like collusion with "yourself" is inevitable. It may not take the form of you making a bad trade to yourself(in fact you shouldn't trade with yourself at all) But it will effect waivers/pickups/draft everything really as well.

If you are asked to fill a league with a second team, that is ok, but needs to be tread upon very carefully.

If a person attempts to mislead you about having two teams(having 2 different yahoo id's etc) imho whether they have cheated or not yet, the only reason you would do this is to cheat, so simply the act of doing so is a removal from the league offense.

However you need to be sure about it being a double owner. IP address is a good start, even if its two people playing from the same location these people need to be scrutinized more carefully than others. This isn't to say that two people playing from the same location are cheaters, but that the propensity for collusive behavior to occur between 2 people who know each other and 10 people who don't, is MUCH higher than the chances of it happening with 12 random people. We had plenty of examples last year of "two buddies" or "father and son" who were making semi-collusive if not _outright_ collusive trades that would never be made between to strangers.

[livinginarizona]

I'd go down the middle with this situation: Let them play, but warn them their trades will receive extra scrutiny, and trades between each of them will not be allowed.

My 2 cents worth.

[Alcooo]

In hindsight, do you feel that in seasons past that there has been collusion between the two teams?

Another unnoted possibility is that they both may use a ISP like AOL, which uses the same IP addresses to many different accounts.