Scambusters or just Scamsters?
The Con - The scamster sets up a web site dedicated to unearthing scams. He can remain anonymous because he says he does not want to deal with retribution from criminals for revealing their scams. He can also claim the essential air of respectability because he runs a crusading site. If evidence on the web is to be believed some of these scambusting sites are run by convicted felons who can say they have turned over a new leaf and are protecting others from people like themselves. The set up is perfect and probably adheres to the scamsters rulebook, which is no doubt available on the web somewhere.
The genius of this is that the scamster will, inevitably, get scams that are genuinely posted on his site, people will see this, not deal with the company and hail the site owner as a hero, thus perpetuating his crusader image. So how is the scamster supposed to make money? There are three ways, the obvious one is posting Google adwords all over your site, the second is asking for ‘donations’ to keep the site free, the third, and by far the most lucrative, is extortion.
The Mark- As a budding internet scambusting scamster you will need a ‘Mark’. Usually an ‘offline’ scamster will research his Mark very well. Knowing his weaknesses and his strengths he will create a scam off the back of them. Blackmail for the adulterer, identity fraud for the careless, financial fraud for the greedy etc. In the pre-Internet days selecting this Mark was known as an art form in itself according to the many books dedicated to the subject, the Internet, however has made this a whole lot easier. Our scam site scamster is in a league of his own however, his Marks are delivered to him on a plate.
I think you would agree that JP Morgan is a trustworthy banking organisation with many years of history, a first class pedigree and about as far away from a scam as you could get. Put JP Morgan AND Scam in Google and you get 271,000 pages. Some may be scams against JP Morgan others are accusing JP Morgan of some sort of scam. I imagine that anyone who would accuse JP Morgan of a scam would receive a barrage of letters from the highest paid and most vicious lawyers on the planet, so our Internet scamster would do well to steer well clear. What if, however, you are a smaller company, who has spent lost of cash on developing your web site and your reputation but couldn’t afford JP Morgans’ flesh eating lawyers? What if someone were to put your name in Google and a scam site was the first thing that came up, what then?
The Sting – A genuinely aggrieved client, an ex employee, a jilted lover or just someone jealous of your company’s’ success, any of these are lurking waiting get their revenge, so they post something, anonymously of course, on a scam web site. You send an email to the site administrator protesting your innocence and he promptly posts your email on the web, making you look like you are trying to bully our scam crusader. The pages on the web are now there for all to see, anyone who you have slighted in business, upset in your local bar or, more likely, someone who is in competition with you, can find your name and perpetuate the bad press about your company, even if you have done nothing wrong. All this in total anonymity.
The sting? Simple, our scamster knows that you will have to spend at least $5000 to get a lawyer to start the process to get him to take down the malicious posts, you will also have to provide evidence to counter complaints that don’t actually exist and you will have to take time to sort the whole issue out. By this time you are getting emails from clients, you may even have lost some business, all you want to do is to get those posts off the web. Then you get an email.
“Dear Mr CEO. I am the administrator of scamsareus.com. From the posts that have appeared on our web site you seem to be having some problems with your client base and have received very poor publicity from posters on our site.
I appreciate that you may want to resolve the situation as quickly as possible so perhaps we could make a suggestion. We will follow up the complaints that have been made on our site on your behalf and attempt to placate these clients to where we feel that there has been a satisfactory resolution. At this point we would be happy to remove the posts from our web site.”
Although you don’t think that there have been any legitimate complaints because no one has contacted your company, you nevertheless think this would be a least a way of getting the posts removed. You write to the administrator saying this would be a good idea and you get a response.
“Dear Mr CEO. Thank you for your mail and I am happy that you value your clients and reputation so highly that you are willing to deal with the situation head-on. When this issue has been resolved this will look very favourable for your company as we will be happy to post that you have been so cooperative and pro active.
We believe that we can resolve these issues to your satisfaction but this will take some time and effort on our part where we will not be able to give full attention to our company. In order that we are compensated for this we will charge a fee of $10,000 payable directly to our account.
We hope you feel this is reasonable for all the time and effort we will be expending to help you regain your reputation with these clients. Clearly if this type of complaint cannot be resolved your company would suffer much greater losses”
There you have it. A brazen request for money to remove these posts wrapped up in a threat of further problems. Not the veiled threats of yesteryear and the skulking in doorways waiting to pay off a blackmailer, a straight up front threat to ruin your business if you do not pay.
So what do you do? If you call your lawyer you are going to pay $5,000 and risk antagonising the scam site and getting worse publicly. For an extra $5,000 you can make it all go away. You are a risk taker, that is why you own a business and you can calculate the risk reward, so you feel that you will probably spend more on lawyers to get nothing, so you pay. The posts are removed and you get on with you life. That is until the next time.
There we have it, the perfect scam. How much did it cost the scamster? Nothing, input “free bulletin boards” in Google and you get 31,200 pages or put in ‘free forums’ and you get over 8,000,000 pages. It is easy to set up one of these sites. We know, because we did it in ten minutes. We set up http://z6.invisionfree.com/Scamfraudalert2 (OK not the sexiest name but it was free!) to gather research on these sites. As of writing we have no members however we suspect we will get lots of research from those who have been contacted by the scam board scam artists, we suspect that we will get our fair share of people standing up for the ‘reformed felons’ too. This will make for some interesting future articles at least.
I am sure by this stage in the article you are wondering whether the above is a plausible situation. With the litigious nature of the US and the ambulance chaser mentality of some law firms, you would have thought that taking defamation cases to court would be a lucrative business. It appears that this in an area were even lawyers are afraid to tread en mass.
Take the case of Les Henderson, allegedly he is the owner of scamfraudalert.com and allegedly goes under the name of ‘scrub’ as an editor on other scam sites. The site came to our notice when we trawling the web for research. A number of companies on the site have complained and had personal mails posted, so we emailed them to hear their stories. This led us on a fascinating path to discover whether some of these scam sites are a front for criminal activity. According to reports on the web (http://www.easybackgroundchecked.com/leshendersonscam.html) Les Henderson was allegedly convicted in California for shoplifting in 1993 and in 1998 was allegedly convicted of selling stolen goods. This may be hearsay but in the spirit of the scambusters we stand to be corrected and will take as read what is on the web, as we are expected to do so with these sites.
Would such a man really attempt such a scam as is detailed above? We have no idea, however, there are a number of court cases that have or are being brought against scam site owners for just this sort of conduct (http://www.internethatesites.com/FR2ndAmmended.pdf is one of them). We have not made a judgment on whether or not these cases have any merit but one would assume that you would not go to court if you were actually perpetrating a fraud.
What if does get to court? Who do you sue? Mr Henderson allegedly lives in Canada behind a string of postal boxes and even if you did get him to court there are various laws protecting owners of anonymous web sites. So you go to the sites Internet Service Provider (ISP) and tell them that in the absence of being able to get the owner of the board you are going to take them to court. Would this work?
There is a very interesting article at http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/ispliability/ispliability.htm which explains the early adoption of Internet defamation laws which are very much the same today.
The Landmark UK case of Godfrey -v- Demon, 1999. Is detailed on the site which concerns statements posted on a site that were described by the Judge as being "squalid, obscene and defamatory to the plaintiff". The posts were on a newsgroup hosted by the defendant ISP Demon Internet Ltd.
When he became aware of the posts, Dr. Godfrey immediately notified the ISP of the existence of the defamatory postings and requested that they be removed as quickly as possible. The defendants failed to remove the postings, despite numerous requests having being made by the plaintiff. The postings remained available to the worldwide public for a further ten days until the system automatically imposed an expiry timeout period.
Predictably, the defendants sought to rely on what has become the standard defense of section 1 of the Defamation Act, 1996. This provision allows for a defense against a defamation claim, where it can be shown that the defendant is not the publisher, author or editor of the statement complained of; that they had taken all reasonable care in relation to its publication and that they did not know, or have reason to believe, that they had caused or contributed to the publication of the defamatory statement.
Essentially the ISP has ten days to resolve the issue, if not they could be held liable. So surely the best way to deal with these issues is to contact the ISP and issue what is known as a ‘Take Down’ notice. Well yes and no, Goggle tells us there are 10,500,000 pages for ‘ISP Provider’. Mr Henderson, allegedly, has moved one of his sites 12 times and put up the same posts.
Surely printing your private email address and private correspondence on the web is against copyright law? In brief, these are your rights:
• Copyright law stops other people from using and abusing your original work, this includes email messages
• All your email messages are copyrighted to you (or your employer) automatically, you do not have to register this copyright
• Whoever you send a mail to does not own the copyright of messages sent and nor does the administrator of the site you send it to
• When you post to a public list you do not lose copyright, but your message may be, archived, forwarded to other lists and quoted by others
Mr Henderson routinely posts private mails that are sent to him and vilifies the poster, inviting others to post against the mailer who is attempting to defend his position. If you respond you have just committed a fatal error. Your name is now archived and available on the search engines for all to see, and to comment upon. Our scamster now has a further grip on you. It’s one thing to have your company on the web, and completely another to have your personal email available for the world to spam you and, generally, abuse you.
In the US the Digital Millennium Act is becoming a crutch for the scamster. Basically because you have to go to court for the offending material to be removed for good.
“The Digital Millennium Act deals specifically with the issue of Internet Service Providers' liability vis-à-vis copyright. The general rule that an ISP will not be held to be liable for providing access or facilitating access to copyright infringing material is preserved by this Act. The Act stipulates a clearly defined notice and take down time table. When an ISP is notified in writing that copyright infringing material is available through its service, it must act expediently to remove or disable access to the offending material. The written notification must provide adequate information to support the claim of copyright infringement. The ISP is then obliged to notify the party, the subscriber that placed the offending material on the server, that the material will be removed from the server within ten working days of the notification having been served. The party alleging the infringement must then seek a Court Order to restrain the subscriber from engaging in the infringing activity by way of an injunction. This must be sought within a ten-day period of the notification. Failure to comply with this time limit, will oblige the ISP to replace or re-activate access to the material in question. This somewhat long winded procedure seeks to strike a balance between the right to Freedom of Expression and the proper enforcement of intellectual property rights.”
Source: JISC Legal Information
Our CEO who has been defamed by the scamster has little choice, if he does not want to pay blackmail he needs to secure a lawyer, issue a takedown notice to the ISP and then seek and injunction. What if you are in France and the ISP is in the US or vice versa? You would have to be able to sustain substantial legal fees with zero hope of getting these fees reimbursed through the courts.
Anonymous Media Requires Rules
The Internet is a fabulous tool for investors, allowing a global research platform that brings together opinions from all sides of the equation. Used correctly it can be a tool for protection of citizens against those who would do us harm physically or financially.
However, being an anonymous media, the potential for abuse is vast and tempting for both mischief makers and criminal elements intent on exploiting it for their own ends. The saying "Beware a vested interest masquerading as moral indignation" could have been an original commandment in the rules of engagement for those reading certain scam boards.
Although we are, of course, in favour of sites that have the genuine intention of protecting us, we abhor the practice of so-called public crusaders masking their nefarious activities with the outward veneer of helping us out and protecting themselves from the consequences by hijacking well intentioned laws. We will continue our research and would like to hear from anyone who believes they have been scammed by this process.
Extortion is extortion, whether it is perpetrated by a Columbian kidnap gang or a former felon masquerading as our savior. If the Internet is to carry on as a valid information platform, lawmakers must address the inconsistencies of legal and procedural issues that let individuals stir up trouble for their own benefit and, ultimately, devalue the Web as a believable information platform.
The Con - The scamster sets up a web site dedicated to unearthing scams. He can remain anonymous because he says he does not want to deal with retribution from criminals for revealing their scams. He can also claim the essential air of respectability because he runs a crusading site. If evidence on the web is to be believed some of these scambusting sites are run by convicted felons who can say they have turned over a new leaf and are protecting others from people like themselves. The set up is perfect and probably adheres to the scamsters rulebook, which is no doubt available on the web somewhere.
The genius of this is that the scamster will, inevitably, get scams that are genuinely posted on his site, people will see this, not deal with the company and hail the site owner as a hero, thus perpetuating his crusader image. So how is the scamster supposed to make money? There are three ways, the obvious one is posting Google adwords all over your site, the second is asking for ‘donations’ to keep the site free, the third, and by far the most lucrative, is extortion.
The Mark- As a budding internet scambusting scamster you will need a ‘Mark’. Usually an ‘offline’ scamster will research his Mark very well. Knowing his weaknesses and his strengths he will create a scam off the back of them. Blackmail for the adulterer, identity fraud for the careless, financial fraud for the greedy etc. In the pre-Internet days selecting this Mark was known as an art form in itself according to the many books dedicated to the subject, the Internet, however has made this a whole lot easier. Our scam site scamster is in a league of his own however, his Marks are delivered to him on a plate.
I think you would agree that JP Morgan is a trustworthy banking organisation with many years of history, a first class pedigree and about as far away from a scam as you could get. Put JP Morgan AND Scam in Google and you get 271,000 pages. Some may be scams against JP Morgan others are accusing JP Morgan of some sort of scam. I imagine that anyone who would accuse JP Morgan of a scam would receive a barrage of letters from the highest paid and most vicious lawyers on the planet, so our Internet scamster would do well to steer well clear. What if, however, you are a smaller company, who has spent lost of cash on developing your web site and your reputation but couldn’t afford JP Morgans’ flesh eating lawyers? What if someone were to put your name in Google and a scam site was the first thing that came up, what then?
The Sting – A genuinely aggrieved client, an ex employee, a jilted lover or just someone jealous of your company’s’ success, any of these are lurking waiting get their revenge, so they post something, anonymously of course, on a scam web site. You send an email to the site administrator protesting your innocence and he promptly posts your email on the web, making you look like you are trying to bully our scam crusader. The pages on the web are now there for all to see, anyone who you have slighted in business, upset in your local bar or, more likely, someone who is in competition with you, can find your name and perpetuate the bad press about your company, even if you have done nothing wrong. All this in total anonymity.
The sting? Simple, our scamster knows that you will have to spend at least $5000 to get a lawyer to start the process to get him to take down the malicious posts, you will also have to provide evidence to counter complaints that don’t actually exist and you will have to take time to sort the whole issue out. By this time you are getting emails from clients, you may even have lost some business, all you want to do is to get those posts off the web. Then you get an email.
“Dear Mr CEO. I am the administrator of scamsareus.com. From the posts that have appeared on our web site you seem to be having some problems with your client base and have received very poor publicity from posters on our site.
I appreciate that you may want to resolve the situation as quickly as possible so perhaps we could make a suggestion. We will follow up the complaints that have been made on our site on your behalf and attempt to placate these clients to where we feel that there has been a satisfactory resolution. At this point we would be happy to remove the posts from our web site.”
Although you don’t think that there have been any legitimate complaints because no one has contacted your company, you nevertheless think this would be a least a way of getting the posts removed. You write to the administrator saying this would be a good idea and you get a response.
“Dear Mr CEO. Thank you for your mail and I am happy that you value your clients and reputation so highly that you are willing to deal with the situation head-on. When this issue has been resolved this will look very favourable for your company as we will be happy to post that you have been so cooperative and pro active.
We believe that we can resolve these issues to your satisfaction but this will take some time and effort on our part where we will not be able to give full attention to our company. In order that we are compensated for this we will charge a fee of $10,000 payable directly to our account.
We hope you feel this is reasonable for all the time and effort we will be expending to help you regain your reputation with these clients. Clearly if this type of complaint cannot be resolved your company would suffer much greater losses”
There you have it. A brazen request for money to remove these posts wrapped up in a threat of further problems. Not the veiled threats of yesteryear and the skulking in doorways waiting to pay off a blackmailer, a straight up front threat to ruin your business if you do not pay.
So what do you do? If you call your lawyer you are going to pay $5,000 and risk antagonising the scam site and getting worse publicly. For an extra $5,000 you can make it all go away. You are a risk taker, that is why you own a business and you can calculate the risk reward, so you feel that you will probably spend more on lawyers to get nothing, so you pay. The posts are removed and you get on with you life. That is until the next time.
There we have it, the perfect scam. How much did it cost the scamster? Nothing, input “free bulletin boards” in Google and you get 31,200 pages or put in ‘free forums’ and you get over 8,000,000 pages. It is easy to set up one of these sites. We know, because we did it in ten minutes. We set up http://z6.invisionfree.com/Scamfraudalert2 (OK not the sexiest name but it was free!) to gather research on these sites. As of writing we have no members however we suspect we will get lots of research from those who have been contacted by the scam board scam artists, we suspect that we will get our fair share of people standing up for the ‘reformed felons’ too. This will make for some interesting future articles at least.
I am sure by this stage in the article you are wondering whether the above is a plausible situation. With the litigious nature of the US and the ambulance chaser mentality of some law firms, you would have thought that taking defamation cases to court would be a lucrative business. It appears that this in an area were even lawyers are afraid to tread en mass.
Take the case of Les Henderson, allegedly he is the owner of scamfraudalert.com and allegedly goes under the name of ‘scrub’ as an editor on other scam sites. The site came to our notice when we trawling the web for research. A number of companies on the site have complained and had personal mails posted, so we emailed them to hear their stories. This led us on a fascinating path to discover whether some of these scam sites are a front for criminal activity. According to reports on the web (http://www.easybackgroundchecked.com/leshendersonscam.html) Les Henderson was allegedly convicted in California for shoplifting in 1993 and in 1998 was allegedly convicted of selling stolen goods. This may be hearsay but in the spirit of the scambusters we stand to be corrected and will take as read what is on the web, as we are expected to do so with these sites.
Would such a man really attempt such a scam as is detailed above? We have no idea, however, there are a number of court cases that have or are being brought against scam site owners for just this sort of conduct (http://www.internethatesites.com/FR2ndAmmended.pdf is one of them). We have not made a judgment on whether or not these cases have any merit but one would assume that you would not go to court if you were actually perpetrating a fraud.
What if does get to court? Who do you sue? Mr Henderson allegedly lives in Canada behind a string of postal boxes and even if you did get him to court there are various laws protecting owners of anonymous web sites. So you go to the sites Internet Service Provider (ISP) and tell them that in the absence of being able to get the owner of the board you are going to take them to court. Would this work?
There is a very interesting article at http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/ispliability/ispliability.htm which explains the early adoption of Internet defamation laws which are very much the same today.
The Landmark UK case of Godfrey -v- Demon, 1999. Is detailed on the site which concerns statements posted on a site that were described by the Judge as being "squalid, obscene and defamatory to the plaintiff". The posts were on a newsgroup hosted by the defendant ISP Demon Internet Ltd.
When he became aware of the posts, Dr. Godfrey immediately notified the ISP of the existence of the defamatory postings and requested that they be removed as quickly as possible. The defendants failed to remove the postings, despite numerous requests having being made by the plaintiff. The postings remained available to the worldwide public for a further ten days until the system automatically imposed an expiry timeout period.
Predictably, the defendants sought to rely on what has become the standard defense of section 1 of the Defamation Act, 1996. This provision allows for a defense against a defamation claim, where it can be shown that the defendant is not the publisher, author or editor of the statement complained of; that they had taken all reasonable care in relation to its publication and that they did not know, or have reason to believe, that they had caused or contributed to the publication of the defamatory statement.
Essentially the ISP has ten days to resolve the issue, if not they could be held liable. So surely the best way to deal with these issues is to contact the ISP and issue what is known as a ‘Take Down’ notice. Well yes and no, Goggle tells us there are 10,500,000 pages for ‘ISP Provider’. Mr Henderson, allegedly, has moved one of his sites 12 times and put up the same posts.
Surely printing your private email address and private correspondence on the web is against copyright law? In brief, these are your rights:
• Copyright law stops other people from using and abusing your original work, this includes email messages
• All your email messages are copyrighted to you (or your employer) automatically, you do not have to register this copyright
• Whoever you send a mail to does not own the copyright of messages sent and nor does the administrator of the site you send it to
• When you post to a public list you do not lose copyright, but your message may be, archived, forwarded to other lists and quoted by others
Mr Henderson routinely posts private mails that are sent to him and vilifies the poster, inviting others to post against the mailer who is attempting to defend his position. If you respond you have just committed a fatal error. Your name is now archived and available on the search engines for all to see, and to comment upon. Our scamster now has a further grip on you. It’s one thing to have your company on the web, and completely another to have your personal email available for the world to spam you and, generally, abuse you.
In the US the Digital Millennium Act is becoming a crutch for the scamster. Basically because you have to go to court for the offending material to be removed for good.
“The Digital Millennium Act deals specifically with the issue of Internet Service Providers' liability vis-à-vis copyright. The general rule that an ISP will not be held to be liable for providing access or facilitating access to copyright infringing material is preserved by this Act. The Act stipulates a clearly defined notice and take down time table. When an ISP is notified in writing that copyright infringing material is available through its service, it must act expediently to remove or disable access to the offending material. The written notification must provide adequate information to support the claim of copyright infringement. The ISP is then obliged to notify the party, the subscriber that placed the offending material on the server, that the material will be removed from the server within ten working days of the notification having been served. The party alleging the infringement must then seek a Court Order to restrain the subscriber from engaging in the infringing activity by way of an injunction. This must be sought within a ten-day period of the notification. Failure to comply with this time limit, will oblige the ISP to replace or re-activate access to the material in question. This somewhat long winded procedure seeks to strike a balance between the right to Freedom of Expression and the proper enforcement of intellectual property rights.”
Source: JISC Legal Information
Our CEO who has been defamed by the scamster has little choice, if he does not want to pay blackmail he needs to secure a lawyer, issue a takedown notice to the ISP and then seek and injunction. What if you are in France and the ISP is in the US or vice versa? You would have to be able to sustain substantial legal fees with zero hope of getting these fees reimbursed through the courts.
Anonymous Media Requires Rules
The Internet is a fabulous tool for investors, allowing a global research platform that brings together opinions from all sides of the equation. Used correctly it can be a tool for protection of citizens against those who would do us harm physically or financially.
However, being an anonymous media, the potential for abuse is vast and tempting for both mischief makers and criminal elements intent on exploiting it for their own ends. The saying "Beware a vested interest masquerading as moral indignation" could have been an original commandment in the rules of engagement for those reading certain scam boards.
Although we are, of course, in favour of sites that have the genuine intention of protecting us, we abhor the practice of so-called public crusaders masking their nefarious activities with the outward veneer of helping us out and protecting themselves from the consequences by hijacking well intentioned laws. We will continue our research and would like to hear from anyone who believes they have been scammed by this process.
Extortion is extortion, whether it is perpetrated by a Columbian kidnap gang or a former felon masquerading as our savior. If the Internet is to carry on as a valid information platform, lawmakers must address the inconsistencies of legal and procedural issues that let individuals stir up trouble for their own benefit and, ultimately, devalue the Web as a believable information platform.
1 comment:
Les Henderson has chosen to not react on the internet about the libel on smear sites and boards, but he took action in real life and filed a lawsuit against a.o. Lou Pearlman, Mark Tolner and Ayman El-Difrawi aka Alec/Michael Defrawy Defrawi aka etcetera who is the filthy mind behind sites like beiconline and easybackgroundchecked.
I guess you must be pleased to know that Defrawy is in Default in this case.
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