[apefish]

I'm probably on the side of OP in this.
I'm not going to get into that too much.

The cheaters at Absolute were tagged because people combined their known data on them to see the patterns.

Anyone who says they only were caught because of the excel file has either ignored the timeline of events or hasn't read the threads at all.

They were "caught" because of the data. The file was important because it led to the other things- namely accounts in the name of Absolute Poker management, the superuser account #363 and traces to the modem of the people.

People were convinced of the cheating long before the file came to light.

Hate the collection of data or not- it absolutely helped crack this case of cheating.
Anyone saying differently has an axe to grind with datamining.