<i>Hey all, this is my first post here on AirsoftArizona. My apologies that it is one of this nature. This is just a copy and paste message I'm putting on most websites around the country to hopefully save people the trouble that my guys, and many more that I have come in contact with over the past several weeks, have had with this guy. I felt it was also important to make sure it got on this board as I recall him mentioning plans to host a game in AZ. I just wanted to give everyone a heads up, and as I stated, hopefully save some people money, time and trouble. Thanks guys and take care.
Glenn</i>
I am writing this post to warn, and hopefully save some fellow airsofters the trouble and money that our local Midwest groups were recently scammed out of by a Pennsylvania based player named Chris Beel. Chris claimed to be holding a game here in Missouri dubbed Operation: Artificial Intelligence and was to be held on Ft. Leonard Wood military base. He claimed to offer a long list of sponsors including Airsoft Elite, Camelbak, Eagle Industries, AirSplat, among others. He became very active on our associations website and we even opened a temporary forum dedicated to the game. I gathered players funds and sent him nearly $1000 in registration money and bb purchases (which he claimed was mandatory to be bought from him).
Come game day the nearly 200 participants that were supposed to be there ended up consisting of approx. 20 of us, mostly from our group. The MPs as well as the Sportsmans Club on base knew nothing about it, and had only been informed we were coming the day before. We sat around waiting for an archery tournament (that had been planned for a year in advance) to start and end on the field we were supposed to be playing on. It postponed the game until approx. 1pm. That’s right, we just sat around all morning! By midday the total was around 26 players and that ended up being the total. We started around 1:30 and played a really weak scenario that last approx. 5 min. Chris, the supposed “game coordinator†lost 2 mags for his M9 and stopped the game for 45 minutes while he looked for them. Normally people would have been more than happy to help him look, but these guys had waited all night in the rain, all morning in the sun, just waiting to play this huge game with 190+ people only to find it was smaller than our local monthly games. Two vendors, Valkyrie Air and Red Soldier both came out and set up. They both lost money. Red Soldier I don’t believe sold anything… Valkyrie was gone by 3pm.
Chris claimed to be out over $2900 on this game. He had no props, no banners, nothing that would have cost him money. It cost $5 a head for us to be there and 26 people showed (however, he lied to the people at the Sportsmans Club and claimed only 18 people were there). You can do the math.
After that he hopped in his van and made his way back to PA. With approx. $1800 in peoples money. We played a few simple skirmishes for approx. 2 ½ hours of what was supposed to be a 25 hour high speed op. Hardly worth it I’d say.
After getting home and doing a bit of research, I have found that this is Chris’s game. He is a scam artist. No one will even play with him in PA. He ripped an acquaintance of mine’s friend off for nearly $2500 worth of airsoft merchandise. He evidentially has done this before in a game called Op: Snow Blind, I believe. At this game only about 20 people showed up as well to my understanding. I believe it involved the Virginia Rangers, unfortunately for them. He lied about so many things and so many times, it would literally take pages to detail it all. He played local players against local players, making up false claims about insulting things that they said about one another. He lied claiming he had served in the 82nd Airborne. After one look at his ghost white face when the MPs asked about prior military service in front of me, who he knew he had made that claim to, I knew he was lying. Someone else later confirmed it. He has lied telling people that he was from different states, such as Maryland, etc.
Bottomline, this guy is trouble. It will simply cost too much to prosecute him over state lines, and we’ll only lose more money in the long run. However, it is my intention to warn the airsoft community about this guy, Chris Beel, so that he cannot take another persons money with the false claims of some great game or merchandise that’s in the mail. We don’t need guys like that in the airsoft community, and we have to be proactive to do what we can to protect each other from them. It is my hopes that this message first saves some player out there time, money and trouble, and secondly that it prohibits Chris Beel from ever playing with honest players again. If anyone has been ripped off by this guy in the past and needs to get ahold of him, I’m going to post here his info in hopes that it does not get deleted. Chris Beel, 5565 Spring Rd., Shermansdale, PA 17090. His phone # is 717-582-3380.
