Amit Defense

Before pursuing any further action, I ask that you first consider what I have to say regarding this situation. I have BCCed numerous quizbowlers to serve as "witnesses" so that they can make their own judgments based on what I have to say. So I ask all of you to please read this email before making a decision.

For anyone who doesn't know exactly what I'm being accused of, I have supposedly created a fake email account--I believe the one in this case is "uvaquizbowl@gmail.com". Then, I posed as Will Butler and asked important quizbowl figures for the question set. They then replied with the questions which I am accused of using at the NSC. One member of the PACE team sent uvaquizbowl@gmail.com a link on the HSAPQ website. A link that was unknown to everyone except for the PACE/HSAPQ team and the owner of the uvaquizbowl@gmail.com account. Someone then clicked on the link and it the IP address of the clicker was matched with mine.

Now my defense begins.

First, the back-story. Back in November I was invited to an IRC channel from #quizbowl by someone to discuss computer-related things. He claims to have known me via another friend of ours. I am fairly confident who this character is, however until I identify him without a reasonable doubt I will not release his name.

We talked for an hour or two and eventually came to the topic of phishing scams (which is what I am being accused of here). I concede that I am fairly boastful by nature, so when he asked me how to do this I explained in detail in addition to how to change one's IP or MAC address to match a model. (I can reexplain this to any PACE member if it would help my case). Afterward, he asked me to perform this for the coming year and in exchange he would pay me. I declined and he continued to ask me over the next few days via the IRC and my AIM screen-name. Eventually I became fed up with this, so I tricked him into opening a program which allowed me to remote-access his desktop. From there I modified some settings and changed things around (another action I regret doing).  I lost contact with him over coming months until early-June. But I will address this later.

I know at this point many of you doubt my story, but I do have evidence to validate this.
On Tuesday morning I sent an email to uvaquizbowl@gmail.com asking him why he did what he did among other things. He responded with some irrelevant text. What is relevant, however, is the email itself.
I ran a sniffing tool on my computer to listen to pings sent by his email client after I sent my message. I then compared these to any record I had from the original IRC client saved through cache or anywhere else in order to obtain an IP address from the sender. (I can explain this too in further detail if it assists in my case).

I obtained two IP addresses in the end. Since this email is being sent to many different people, I will not post the entire addresses here. To at least give some semblance of truth, the starting digits are 69.73.180.xxx. This address points to place of business. The other address I have seems to be the perpetrator’s actual residence. However, both of them point to the region where the person I believe did this resides. Mike, if you want the details of this tracing, I will send them to you.

The evidence against me does not link me directly to the packet set, rather it connects me to a link sent by Trygve to uvaquizbowl@gmail.com.

The other person in question and I lost contact until early June, as explained above. At this point, he told me that he is currently in the process of obtaining the NASAT set. At this moment, I was unaware that he previously obtained the PACE set. I obviously did not believe him so he gave me the HSAPQ link as evidence, which was part of PACE/HSAPQ's sting operation and clicking on that incriminated me.

Then, at the hotel in Nashville I had another conversation with him Friday evening and Saturday morning. He told me that he was "smarter than you thought" and supposedly "hacked into" an account on one Trygve's or Mike's server and obtained questions from PACE of next year. On face, this claim seemed even more ridiculous and I asked for the link. He gave it to me and this logged the hotel IP.

I understand that this story is hard to believe at first, but given the fact that the true IP to the email address itself was tracked, this is beyond "reasonable doubt".
It is impossible to change the IP given from an email and the only way for me to do this is to physically travel to this location, log into that address and send myself an email.

I made numerous phone calls yesterday and today from my home phone, verifying my location. In addition, it would be nearly impossible to make this 13 or so hour drive to this location and return within two days.

Given that, I will now make an appeal from a personal stance.

I will not lie, so I will say that there was one instance of dishonesty in a class a few months back, however the magnitude of that compared to perpetrating a heist to obtain questions are not equal.

Second, if I was truly doing this to bolster my own image in the world of quizbowl, why would I take the time to organize the Quizbowl Charity Event and why would I have signed up to write for one additional tournament now plus writing for numerous other tournaments in the past?
Volunteering to write questions serve two purposes: 1. To help the quizbowl community with more tournaments and 2. As a method of studying.  If was really obtaining questions illegally, there would be no need to study. So, if I was devoid of such moral character, why would I want to assist the community by writing questions?  (If anyone is wondering, I intend to continue this project regardless of the outcome of this defense. I will not allow this misunderstanding to hinder the teams who would benefit from the Charity Event)


Third, I have never had any brush-up with wrongdoing in quizbowl in the past. No one can attest to me doing anything wrong to anyone. I have absolutely no history of malice within quizbowl. It would be unlikely for me to go from a clean record to possibly the worst crime committed within quizbowl. This is comparable to someone with a clean criminal record committing an armed robbery. Instead, the vast majority of armed robbers have a record of petty thefts slowly escalating to something like an armed robbery.

Fourth, my performance at PACE was not that surprising given my tournament past. (I am not intending on boasting from this; this is just necessary for my appeal)

The most notable tournaments would be EFT, ACF Fall, and HFT.

A. Immediately, most of you will point to the previous (and failed) scandal regarding the HFT questions. However, note that that attempt was a failure by whoever the perpetrator was, and notice that I answered a total of 14 tossups over the two-game final against Southside A. Even though the questions were not leaked, I was still able to perform well. This compares to Ming's 15 tossups between those two games.

B. EFT is another tournament we can look at. My team played Southside A in the prelims. In that round I scored 50 points, while Ming scored 60. In addition, I was the second highest scorer overall.

C. At ACF Fall my team placed 12th overall which isn't commendable per se, but I believe it is still a good finish by a team of high-schoolers. A notable round included a ~30 point loss to USC A. (I apologize if that isn't the correct margin of defeat. I believe my stats had an error or two)

D. In addition, if I really did have the question set for the NSC, why would I have settled for 2nd place? A forum post claimed that I was waiting for a time to buzz in, however SC buzzed in with actual knowledge at that point. This still doesn’t explain our low bonus conversation against them, Maggie Walker, and plenty of other excellent teams. If I truly wanted to seem inconspicuous, I would have aimed at improving our bonus conversion. In addition, this also doesn’t explain why I would “choose” to beat SC, but lose to Georgetown Day. No offense to any of these teams, I am just saying what I have to in order to defend myself.

E. Finally, my work ethic regarding my extracurricular activities can be used to explain my character. I tend to care a lot more about my extracurriculars compared to my actual schoolwork--not the best mindset. Since this email is also being sent to my school, anyone there can contact our debate coach who can attest to this if you need a reference unrelated to quizbowl.

In addition, my general personality is not one that would point to a crime of this magnitude. There are only a few people in quizbowl who know me well enough, but they can attest to the fact that my non-quizbowl activities do not indicate someone who does something like this. For instance, I am a Boy Scout and have been for almost 12 years. Further, I spend much of my free time baking, which isn’t exactly the favorite activity of thieves. (I am attempting to paint myself within a good light, so excuse me if some of this information seems irrelevant.)


I have presented my case. Now I will refute the arguments brought against me, making references to the above when necessary.

The majority of these accusations depend on my possession of the email account “uvaquizbowl@gmail.com”. However, as shown above (which can be proven further in more detail), the IP of the email itself cannot be traced to me. This is the primary fault in PACE’s accusations. They can only connect me to the link sent. If that link proliferated, something like this could occur. However, there is no other explanation for my evidence.

The other major accusation is that I pretended to be sick so I wouldn’t have to place NASAT, then contacted Trygve Saturday morning and attempted to obtain questions, further.  First, I was legitimately sick that morning. The previous evening I purchased medication from a Rite-Aid. I no longer have the receipt from this purchase, but I do have witnesses to confirm that I did consume the medication.  It would be extremely foolish for me to consume medicine when it was not needed and I would not hurt myself is such a way.

In addition, the claim is put forth that right as someone conversed with Trygve, I called my coach at Vanderbilt and claimed that I was okay. Of course this is going to be true because right as I woke up I grabbed my iPod and checked my Facebook, email, etc. It is fair to assume that if I woke up that morning feeling better, I would want to go to NASAT and since it is impossible for me to access the internet while I was sleeping, it would make sense that I checked my mail, accessed Facebook, clicked on the link, and called my coach all within the interval of me waking up and actually going to Vanderbilt. If I was still not feeling better, I would not have grabbed my iPod and clicked on that link, therefore me feeling better was a prerequisite of any of these other events that involve me.

Furthermore, it is said that I confessed to stealing questions. However, I only admitted to having some connection to this scandal via the situation explained here. I explained how PACE, NASAT, and possibly ACF Nationals were being discussed by this third party and that I personally have no direct link into the theft of the set.

 I believe that given the IP evidence which links directly to the email account, this is enough reasonable doubt to acquit me of this crime. Moreover, given how simple it is to hide one’s IP address and the fact that this other figure does have knowledge on how to do this, it is highly-likely that this technique was employed in my situation.



Thank you,

Amit Bilgi