Good evening SHL

It was brought to the attention of SHL Head Office that user @NJBadApple has been plagiarizing written PTs by copying and slightly altering other users’ PT responses. After an investigation, it was determined that this offense took place between S71-S77, and included 42 separate PTs (including Championship Week, All Star Week, and mini PT instances) for a total of 171 illegally obtained TPE. 


The minimum rulebook punishment for TPE cheating (Section I, Subsection K, rule 2) is as follows:

Quote:Any Site Member who attempts to cheat by stealing money or TPE will be punished with a $5,000,000 fine, as well as a removal of the money stolen in money-related cases, or a removal of the TPE in TPE-related cases.

Quote:The SHL Head Office reserves the right to levy a harsher punishment based on the severity of the case.

This is an offense that we take extremely seriously, and occurred on an unprecedented level of severity and intent. While we have had punishments for incorrectly claiming TPE in the past, we have not seen a TPE-related offense at quite this level of deliberate and blatant misconduct. This is not only disrespectful to all users who put in the effort to participate in this league by writing PTs, it is also an especially egregious offense towards the individual users whose work was misappropriated for this purpose. The infractions also took place over the span of six full seasons. In light of that, we believe that the punishment for this offense should be harsher than the previous incidents available. 


For these reasons, Head Office has ruled to enact the following punishment:

• NJBadapple’s player, Mads McBride, will have TPE removed in the amount of 2.5 times the TPE illegally obtained, for a total of 428 TPE.
  
• $5,000,000 fine for each full season in which the cheating took place, for a total of $30,000,000.
  
• All individual awards earned by Mads McBride during the time frame the cheating took place will be removed. In addition, Mads McBride will not be eligible for Hall of Fame consideration.
  
• NJBadApple will be ineligible to complete written PTs (Weekly PT + mPT) including Championship Week and All-Star Week for two seasons (18 weeks) of activity (seasons in which the user does not have an active player will not be counted towards this total).
  

NJBadApple may send an appeal request to any head of the appeals committee, currently consisting of @DrunkenTeddy and @Leafs4ever.