Google Apparently No Longer Humoring Court Orders To Delist Defamatory Content

from the 'it's-called-the-CDA,-and-you're-going-to-want-to-scroll-down-to-Sec dept

Chris Silver Smith, writing for Search Engine Land, notes that Google seems to have stopped responding to defamation lawsuit court orders.

A number of attorneys who specialize in online defamation/libel cases have reported to me that Google has recently suspended its longstanding, informal policy of removing URLs from US search results that are specified in duly executed court orders. This poses a major paradigm shift for many victims of online reputation attacks.

Beginning around August or September of this year, a number of attorneys from across the US began receiving blanket denials after submitting requests to remove defamatory content from Google’s search results.

That timing seems to coincide with Paul Alan Levy/Public Citizen's intervention in a case where an order to delist traced back to a dentist unhappy with an online review. The eventual delisting by Google came as the result of a bogus lawsuit -- filed with or without the knowledge of the dentist Mitul Patel -- against a bogus defendant. The fake "Matthew Chan" signed a document agreeing to remove his review and the court ordered Google to take it down.

Another similarly-fake lawsuit followed soon after. Levy, working with Eugene Volokh, has managed to uncover the shady reputation management firm behind a stack of bogus libel lawsuits, all filed against nonexistent defendants.

Smith makes no mention of those efforts in his article questioning Google's actions. He does, however, point to Pissed Consumer's uncovering of the same tactics earlier in the year: bogus lawsuits designed from the ground up to obtain court orders for the delisting of URLs.

In the spring, Pissed Consumer reported that a number of suspicious lawsuits with purportedly bogus defendants were filed in California courts to obtain defamation court orders enabling URLs to get delisted by Google. In October, Pissed Consumer sued a reputation management company and attorneys that are alleged to be behind “sham lawsuits” and “stooge defendants” that were used to fool Google into removing undesirable consumer reviews.

Undoubtedly, Pissed Consumer's work pushed Google to scrutinize defamation court orders more closely, but Levy's findings likely tipped the scale. Smith feels these bogus lawsuits may have been a factor, but the legal documents he's been forwarded by other attorneys don't share the same "sloppiness" and "commonalities" of those Pissed Consumer uncovered.

This change in policy obviously poses problems for those who have obtained court orders for delisting.

For the attorneys and their clients who are now failing to procure intervention on the part of Google after they have gone through ofttimes-lengthy and costly litigation processes, the abrupt apparent change in policy and lack of explanation are upsetting and confusing.

Of course, the people to blame for this policy shift aren't employed at Google. They work for -- or run -- sketchy reputation management services that overpromise and underdeliver. A few thought they'd found a loophole in the legal system. It has worked for some, but that little fraudulent joyride is now apparently over.

But Google never had to comply with these orders in the first place -- even those obtained legitimately. Section 230 of the CDA says Google isn't legally responsible for third-party postings, which would basically be everything the search engine indexes. If it has been compliant in the past, it has been going above and beyond what's legally expected of it.

As legitimate lawyers are aware (or at least should be…), the proper target for a defamation lawsuit is the author of the libelous statements. Targeting service providers for third-party content is the wrong way to handle this.

Smith points out that the new Google status quo sucks for victims of defamation, who have often found the search engine to be a relief valve of sorts that allowed them to see unfavorable statements delisted without having to take on more antagonistic sites like Ripoff Report head-on. But while it's true addressing online defamation can be expensive and fatiguing, Google's willingness to allow plaintiffs to cut corners hasn't done it any favors.

Plaintiffs represented by Smith's colleagues aren't the only ones who are going to be hurting.

If this new paradigm becomes status quo, the attorneys expert in these matters will likely halt assisting new clients, because there will be no way to reasonably predict positive outcomes, and risk of failure will be too high.

Once again, some of the blame for the current situation rests on those who have "predicted positive outcomes" based on using search engines as a proxy defendant. If attorneys (and reputation management firms) hadn't gotten into the habit of sending orders to Google, rather than seeking out the online commenters behind the libelous statements, this decision wouldn't be so difficult to take.

Filed Under: bogus lawsuits, cda 230, defamation, delisting, reputation management, search engine optimization, section 230
Companies: google

DMCA Process Abused To Nuke Post About Researcher Who Faked Data On Federally-Funded Study

from the 'DM'-stands-for-'Dick-Move' dept

Wonderful. It's another one of those anomalies that happens all the time: copyright as censor.

This time, the person abusing copyright protection tools to shut someone up is a disgraced researcher (Kaushik Deb) who received a three-year federal funding ban for "intentionally, knowingly, and recklessly" fabricating data in a research paper created with tax dollars.

Retraction Watch was informed by its hosting service that it had received a DMCA notice targeting the post. The tactic used here is one we've seen before: copy-pasting and backdating of posts to make it appear as though the targeted site is the one engaging in copyright infringement.

On Wednesday, our host, Bluehost, forwarded us another false copyright claim — aka a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice — by someone calling himself “Jiya Khan” and claiming to be based in Delhi, India. (Well, specifically, in “Rohini,sector-12,” which would mean that he or she is based at one of two petrol stations.)

Khan insisted under penalty of perjury that a December 2014 post of ours — which we have now temporarily removed from public view (more on that in a moment) — violated his or her copyright.

What actually happened, in an eerie echo of the 2013 case, is that Khan copied and pasted our December 9 post onto his or her site, then backdated it to December 5 to make it look older than ours, so that he or she could make a false copyright claim. (That, among other things, is a bit of a problem for Khan; the Federal Register notice that the post is about — and to which it manages not to link — wasn’t published until December 9.)

The bogus backdated Blogspot blog contains several other copy-pasted posts, suggesting "Jiya Khan" is just a fake name fronting for a sketchy reputation management service. Presumably, bogus DMCA notices have been issued to target the mixture of critical articles and negative reviews splashed across the blog's pages. It's not exactly a surefire way to rid the net of criticism, but it's cheap and easy and works just often enough it's worth trying. We saw this with disgraced real estate lawyer Sean Gjerde, and gripe sites have seen it happen with just about everyone else.

For the time being, the Retraction Watch post is down. The Federal Register's recounting of the incident and its sanctioning of Dr. Kaushik Deb is still live, and there are multiple snapshots of Retraction Watch's post on Kaushik Deb's data-faking hosted at the Internet Archive.

Retraction Watch is challenging the DMCA takedown notice. Presumably, the post will be live again in the near future. Then again, "Jiya Khan" may continue to insist he created Retraction Watch's post, which means Bluehost won't be able to do much more than keep the post down until all permutations of the DMCA process have been played out.

But that's how easy it is to make fully-factual criticism disappear, even if only temporarily. And whoever's mismanaging Kaushik Deb's questionable reputation knows this. Even if there's provable perjury in the takedown request, who's going to actually be able to track down the real person behind the "Jiya Khan" facade, much less manage to hold them accountable for their abuse of the system?

Filed Under: censorship, dmca, kaushik deb, reputation management, research
Companies: bluehost, retraction watch

Paul Levy Discovers Head Of Reputation Management Company Signed Off On Forged/Fraudulent Court Docs

from the how-the-terrible-have-fallen...-lower...-I-guess... dept

As a result of a federal judge in Rhode Island taking a second look at an order he hastily granted earlier, Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen has been able to confirm Richart Ruddie -- the head of an extremely-sketchy reputation management company -- signed off on the forged and fraudulent documents delivered to the court. The documents -- a bogus lawsuit featuring the forged signatures of both the plaintiff and the defendant -- are apparently just part of Profile Defenders' reputation management work.

Nice work if you can get [away with] it. File a bogus lawsuit. "Locate" a bogus defendant. Produce a signed admission of guilt and ask the judge to order search engines to delist the offending content. Cash checks. Repeat until caught.

Richart Ruddie has been caught.

While I was at the courthouse in Providence, I had the chance to talk to the clerk’s office and learned the identity of the process service that brought the forged litigation papers to court. The process server, in turn, when informed that he had filed forged papers, had no compunction about identifying the company which in turn had provided those papers and the company on whose account the check to pay the filing fee had been written. The check was from RIR1984 LLC, the very company with which Rescue One Financial had contracted for services to get Steve Rhode’s critical web pages removed from search engine indexes. The individual signer for RIR1984 on the contract is Richart Ruddie, who, as Eugene Volokh and I reported last month, is apparently responsible for dozens of fake lawsuits around the country. And the go-between was “Annuity Sold,” a company with which Richart Ruddie himself has self-identified.

Levy has now moved to vacate the court order and dismiss the complaint. He's also pursuing legal fees, but something about Ruddie's character (along with his cast of nonexistent libel lawsuit defendants) suggests this attempt may be fruitless. In any event, Ruddie will likely stop filing bogus lawsuits. But he may also find himself facing a federal investigation for his past misdeeds. From the hearing transcript [PDF]:

THE COURT: [...] I am going to have a transcript of this proceeding prepared, and I'm going to order the Clerk to send a copy of the file, all of your filings, as well as the transcript of this proceeding this afternoon to the United States Attorney's office for them to review because it does appear to me, as I said earlier, just at first blush, that there's potentially multiple crimes that have been committed, both fraud and potentially forgery. And various kinds of fraud, I think, are in play here, and so I think it is something that law enforcement should become aware of and investigate.

I'm embarrassed that this order, this consent order, was signed, but it shows you just how, you know, in a busy court, how something like this can happen. But I'm, frankly, if everything that's in here is true, which it appears to be, I'm pretty outraged about it.

That noise you hear in the background is popcorn producers stepping up production. There may be some very interesting developments in the near future. Not only that, but it appears Richart Ruddie isn't the only one engaging in this sort of fraudulent behavior. Pissed Consumer is also asking courts to take a closer look at some suspicious libel lawsuits that have resulted in delisting of its content -- lawsuits that follow the same M.O. as the ones spotted by Levy.

Filed Under: defamation, fake lawsuits, fraud, paul levy, reputation management, rhode island, richart ruddie
Companies: profile defenders

Federal Judge Now Taking A Closer Look At Bogus Libel Lawsuits Filed By Unscrupulous Reputation Management Companies

from the Paul-Alan-Levy,-internet-hero dept

Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen is finally getting some judges to pay closer attention to bogus libel lawsuits being filed in hopes of delisting negative reviews.

The process -- one that's been uncovered by Levy, as well as complaint site Pissed Consumer -- is this:

A bogus libel lawsuit is filed, containing little more than conclusory statements and vague allegations about reputational damage. Miraculously, the alleged online defamer is located within days of the filing and convinced to sign an affidavit admitting guilt. These are presented to the judge, who then issues an order for delisting of content by search engines.

These orders are lobbed into the overstuffed inboxes of Google, etc. and the reputation management firms behind these bogus lawsuits presumably sit back and issue invoices. At no point is any attempt made to contact the site where the supposedly libelous review is posted because that would just cause too many problems. Sites like Pissed Consumer and Ripoff Report fight back hard against attempts to remove reviews. The easiest route -- at least so far -- has been to bypass the alleged defamer and the original sites altogether and let Google, Bing, et al do the dirty work.

One of these bogus lawsuits was filed in Rhode Island, attracting the attention of the site owner whose site was indirectly targeted by the fake lawsuit. Someone calling themselves "Bradley Smith" sued a commenter using the name "Deborah Garcia." That the suit was filed in Rhode Island has little to do with "Deborah Garcia" (whose IP address indicates she resides in California), nor the site where the comments were posted, which is located in North Carolina. Likewise, the supposed plaintiff is also not a resident of Rhode Island, but rather another Californian. But Rhode Island has something the other two states don't: a longer statute of limitations on libel lawsuits.

Paul Alan Levy intervened on behalf of Steve "Get Out of Debt Guy" Rhode, whose site was targeted by the fake lawsuit. That move has paid off for Rhode, and will hopefully get the ball rolling on closer inspection of libel lawsuits seeking suspiciously speedy resolutions.

Judge William E. Smith issued an order earlier stipulating delisting of the URL by various search engines. Levy has asked the judge to roll it back, given the lawsuit's extremely dubious origins.

Levy is now asking Smith to vacate that order, alleging that the suit is a fake — and that Garcia doesn't even exist. Her 1588 Main St. address in Warwick cannot be found, said Levy, who also checked for Garcia at that address in West Warwick. The IP addresses on the negative posts, too, indicate the person commenting was based in California.

"Simply put, as we see it, this is a fraudulent lawsuit" filed by an unscrupulous and sophisticated person, Levy told Judge Smith during a hearing Wednesday.

It appears Profile Defenders -- a reputation management firm linked to other bogus lawsuits filed elsewhere -- is also connected to this case. Levy produced a contract between Profile Defenders and Rescue One showing that the reputation management firm had successfully removed content from the "Get Out of Debt Guy" website. He also presented an affidavit from the real Bradley Smith, saying he hadn't filed the lawsuit nor participated in its filing in any way.

Judge Smith has now granted Levy's request to seek who's behind this lawsuit, starting with the check used to pay the filing fees. Judge Smith is now taking a second look at this lawsuit and is clearly disturbed by what he's seeing.

In granting that request, Judge Smith took it a step further, saying he believed something even more foul is in play. "It does appear to me, at first blush, that multiple crimes have been committed," Judge Smith said, referencing possible fraud and forgery. "I'm pretty outraged about it."

Smith ordered that a transcript of the proceedings be sent to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Hopefully, this discovery -- and perhaps an investigation by federal prosecutors -- will result in the unmasking of those abusing the court system to cash rep management checks. Hopefully, there will also be meaningful sanctions waiting for lawyers who willingly participated in this scheme. Now that these lawsuits are facing additional scrutiny, it's highly unlikely this reputation management "strategy" has much life left in it, even without the threat of federal scrutiny.

Filed Under: bogus lawsuits, bradley smith, deborah garcia, defamation, paul levy, reputation management, steve rhode
Companies: profile defenders

Pissed Consumer Sues Reputation Management Firms Over Their Bogus Lawsuit/Fake Defendant/Takedown Scams

from the well,-here-we-go... dept

In the last few weeks, we've written a few posts about Richart Ruddie's company, Profile Defenders, which appears to be "improving reputations" online by filing bogus defamation lawsuits, finding a bogus made-up "defendant" to "admit" to posting defamatory information, reaching a "settlement" and getting a court order. The whole scheme is about getting that court order, which is then sent on to Google and others (mainly Google). The whole point: if Google sees a court order saying that some content is defamatory, it will de-index that page. That the whole process to get that court order is a total sham is basically ignored. That may be changing. We were just noting that some of Profile Defenders' cases are in trouble, and at least one has had the court order vacated.

Of course, it appears that Ruddie and Profile Defenders are not the only ones playing this game of judicial fraud. We wrote about a bunch of similar cases back in March that were targeting the online review site Pissed Consumer and some other review sites. At the time, Pissed Consumer had found 11 such lawsuits. In that article, we noted some of the lawyers and firms that appeared to be either involved or benefiting from these cases. And it appears that Pissed Consumer has had enough -- and has sued (represented by Marc Randazaa).

You can read the full complaint, which is an interesting read. It goes into great detail on each of the different cases that it's suing over, but the introduction to the complaint lays out the basics. I'm reposting it in full (minus some citations) here because it's a good summary:

This case involves a creative solution to a common frustration for many businesses, who do not like negative reviews that are published about them on the Internet. However, removing consumer reviews from the Internet is a difficult process given that they are protected by the First Amendment.

Nevada Corporate Headquarters, has gone to great lengths to attempt to suppress consumer reviews in the past. It has filed at least one SLAPP suit in Nevada seeking injunctive relief to censor those negative reviews. In that case, Nevada Corporate Headquarters suffered a resounding loss when they were hit with an anti-SLAPP order.... They also lost at summary judgment in a SLAPP-back suit. That action resulted in a significant judgment for attorney fees and costs....

Undaunted by these set-backs, Nevada Corporate Headquarters has now conspired with other companies and individuals to create a scam whereby they suppress negative reviews from the Internet, while evading any First Amendment or due process considerations. This scam also allows them to avoid the risk of another anti-SLAPP attorney fee award.

Several other businesses and professionals who have been the subject of negative reviews online have also employed the same fraudulent machinery as Nevada Corporate Headquarters, as a means of removing this content while evading detection and liability.

The scam is not all that complicated. Google will remove search engine results from its well-known search engine if it is provided with a court order determining that the information is indeed defamatory.

However, when Nevada Corporate Headquarters sued consumer review websites in the past, it was severely disappointed. (See Exhibits 1 & 2.) Therefore, they needed to concoct a new censorship scam. So they used a stooge plaintiff, ZCS Inc. ("ZCS"), to sue a stooge defendant, Collins Mattos ("Mattos").

Defendant Doe Corporations, so called “reputation management companies,” conceived and organized the scam as an alternative way to remove negative posts in lieu of undergoing an adversarial proceeding. Several other businesses and professionals have contacted these “reputation management companies,” which have used similar schemes to remove negative consumer reviews about them.

The other conspirators engaged attorneys Mark W. Lapham ("Lapham") and Owen T. Mascott (“Mascott”) to file sham lawsuits either by the subjects of the negative reviews or by corporations that had no interest in the allegedly defamatory statements, against a defendant who most certainly was not the party that published the allegedly defamatory statements, and the parties immediately stipulated to a judgment of injunctive relief, so the conspirators could provide the order to Google and other search engines, thus achieving the goal of deindexing all pages containing negative reviews.

At first blush, Defendants’ scam appears rather brilliant but incredibly unethical. Now that Plaintiff has uncovered and exposed Defendants’ unlawful deeds, Consumer Opinion LLC respectfully requests that this Court discipline them for those misdeeds.

The rest of the filing goes into a lot more details about these court orders, obtained under false pretenses.

The actual claims in the case are for unlawful, unfair and fraudulent business practices, abuse of process and civil conspiracy. As we've seen in other cases, actually getting lawyers disciplined for such bad behavior is actually fairly rare. But Randazza has a history of being a bulldog about these kinds of things (remember Righthaven?). This should be an interesting case to follow.

Filed Under: court orders, defamation, fake lawsuits, mark lapham, owen mascott, reputation management, richart ruddie, takedowns
Companies: nevada corporate headquarters, pissed consumer

With Interest In Profile Defenders' Questionable Lawsuits Rising, The Lawsuits Start Falling

from the reputation-management dept

Earlier this year, we were among the first to write about the highly questionable practice of "reputation management" companies filing clearly bogus lawsuits against unknown defendants, only to magically have those "defendants" show up a day or two later with an agreement that they had posted defamatory content. The goal of these lawsuits was obvious: get a court order. That's because many platform websites, including Google, won't take down or delink content based on a claim of defamation, but will do so if there's a court order. Of course, filing a real lawsuit has all sorts of problems, including money and actually needing to have a real case. These reputation management lawsuits got around all of that by basically faking defendants, having them "agree" to a settlement admitting to defamation, and getting a court order saying that the content is defamatory. Neat and clean. And total abuse of legal process.

Last month, Public Citizen's Paul Levy (who has helped defend Techdirt against some legal bullies) picked up on this thread and found evidence of more bogus lawsuits. A few weeks ago, he and famed law professor Eugene Volokh teamed up to reveal more details on a series of such lawsuits, which all seemed to be connected back to a guy named Richart Ruddie and an operation that goes by a bunch of names, but mainly Profile Defenders. It appears that Ruddie/Profile Defenders is not the only one filing these kinds of lawsuits, but he's been prolific. So far, Ruddie's only response is a bizarre press release touting his "anti-cyberbullying skills."

He may want to find a real lawyer though.

Volokh reports that one of the courts that had granted one of Profile Defenders' orders has now vacated that order. Of course, that might not matter since Ruddie has likely already used it to have content taken down. But, more importantly, the judge in that case is considering another case that looks like it's another Profile Defenders case. And suddenly, the judge seems a lot more interested in the details.

I’m delighted to report that late last week, the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas vacated the order in one of these cases, Callagy v. Roffman (No. 160603108). The plaintiff’s lawyer told us that the company they used for that case was Profile Defenders, but they had no idea that the defendant in that case was apparently nonexistent (and it’s certainly possible that they indeed had no idea of this).

Also late last week, the same judge scheduled a hearing in Murtagh v. Reynolds (No. 160901262), in which no order had yet been issued; the order scheduling the hearing notes that the plaintiff must present “strict proof of service” for the case to go forward. I haven’t been able to reach the plaintiff in that case — or the ostensible plaintiff, as in some cases the plaintiffs have said that they hadn’t authorized a lawsuit, and in some cases the plaintiffs may have been as fake as the defendants, since the only important thing to the filers was to block access to particular websites mentioned in the order, regardless of who the named plaintiffs or defendants had been. I therefore can’t speak with confidence about whether Murtagh was a Profile Defenders case; but the procedural structure of the case is similar to the others I’ve seen, as is some of the legal boilerplate.

That's not all. A day later, Volokh wrote about another such case that was voluntarily dismissed. In this case, Volokh notes that the reputation management scheme may have been even more nefarious than previously thought. Most of the examples we've seen involve trying to remove articles or reviews by claiming those articles are defamatory and then "faking" a "defendant" willing to "settle" and admit guilt in order to get a court order. But in this latest case (and in another one Volokh has seen) it appears that the reputation management operation would try to get a news article to disappear from Google by first submitting a defamatory comment by themselves, and then suing for "defamation" based on that comment (and, then, of course, producing a "defendant" who settles). End result: Google is told to delist an entire article because of a defamatory comment... put there by the "reputation management" firm in the first place:

The article went up in January 2014, but then in July 2016 a comment was posted to the article. (The comment has been deleted in the past few weeks, but the people at the Post & Courier assure me that it wasn’t deleted by them.) And then just a few weeks later, the lawsuit was filed, claiming that the comment was defamatory and that the comment’s author agreed to an injunction ordering the removal of the comment. The plan, I suspect, was to take any such injunction and submit it to Google as a basis for deindexing the whole article (because Google can’t separately deindex the comment). Sometimes this sort of plan has worked.

The comment plays a peculiar role in such cases, I think. In one similarly structured case, for which I have been told what day the contract with the reputation management company (there, Profile Defenders) was signed, the comment was posted immediately after that signing, so I assume that comment was ginned up for the purposes of that lawsuit.

Hopefully, as more judges learn about this scam, it won't be so easy to pull off.

Filed Under: defamation, eugene volokh, fake defamation lawsuits, reputation management, richart ruddie
Companies: profile defenders

Reputation Management Company Linked To Bogus Libel Lawsuits Now Hyping Its Anti-Cyberbullying Skills

from the loutish-abuse-of-the-legal-system-notwithstanding dept

Fake lawsuits featuring fake plaintiffs filed against fake defendants and hustled past judges to secure court orders demanding delisting by search engines: that's the new face of reputation management, apparently.

Paul Alan Levy, along with newly-acquired partner Eugene Volokh, have managed to track down the possible perpetrator behind a couple dozen bogus lawsuits filed in recent months. Richart Ruddie and his company, Profile Defenders, appear to be engaging in some illegal activity in order to provide clients with the services they've promised them.

Ruddie has refused to comment on the lawsuits or answer questions posed by Levy and Volokh. Instead, he has opted to fight speech with more speech [lol] by issuing a very self-serving press release.

Here's what Profile Defenders has to say about itself -- not in response to any questions, but rather to buff some of the tarnish off its dented armor. It's not just about "protecting the rich." [No. Really.] It's about saving clients from cyberbullying. (h/t Paul Alan Levy)

Reputation management companies like Profile Defenders protect the innocent from the action of cyberbullies who prey on people.

[...]

Fortunately, reputation management companies like Profile Defenders have arrived, and in the war between reputation companies vs cyber bullies they give the innocent a chance to tell their story on the Internet. Co-founder of Profile Defenders, Richart Ruddie, is glad that people are given a second chance after being defamed by cyber bullies that act like new age mobsters trying to destroy good people through cyber bullying.

I assume Levy, Volokh, and others who have covered this slowly-unravelling debacle are the "new age monsters" attempting to destroy "good people" --"good people" who apparently have no problem filing bogus lawsuits and forging signatures, all the while charging thousands of dollars to drag down their clients' reputations along with their own.

Then there's this, helpfully pointed out by a commenter (and victim of one of PD's bogus lawsuits) on Levy's post. Ruddie's personal blog contains a post with some enlightening thoughts about journalism.

Writers and journalists typically use their powers for evil and to hurt good people.

And what sort of people are the "good people" hurt by "evil" journalists? Richart Ruddie is, according to Richart Ruddie.

Had one of the nicest compliments this past weekend. A new friend said "Chart do you know why I like you?"

"At the end of the day you're just a genuine person Richart Ruddie"

You're not looking for anything from anybody, you are just here to be happy and have a good time and if you can facilitate others to be happy as well then you do your part to ensure all others around you are happy.

Yep. Genuine as fuck. More from Levy:

[I] expect that Ruddie will prove a slippery character – the home page of his “Profile Defenders” web site provides a New York City street address that appears to be phony (a letter I sent him at that address demanding that he preserve relevant documents came back undeliverable), and both the Linked In and Google profiles of Profile Defenders show a Washington, D.C. address that does not exist. Moreover, Florida’s records reveal that Ruddie maintains a stable of many different LLC’s. It may take the investigative resources of a federal or state grand jury or of the Federal Trade Commission to track him and his assets down, and bring him to justice.

Volokh and Levy have uncovered plenty of damning evidence strongly suggesting Ruddie's company is now in the business of filing bogus lawsuits simply because (a) there's very little chance any judge will examine these cases closely (and when a judge does, the suit is refiled in another court) and (b) it's one of the only methods proven to result in delistings of negative reviews hosted by non-parties to the lawsuits. As Levy notes, it may be almost impossible to blow this wide open, much less get Ruddie to answer any questions about these lawsuits on the record. But the reputational damage his company is now causing indirectly to its clients may result in lawsuits Ruddie can't ignore, filed by aggrieved customers who paid thousands of dollars just to see themselves swept into Profile Defender's destructive vortex.

Filed Under: eugene volokh, fake lawsuits, paul levy, reputation management, richart ruddie, takedowns
Companies: profile defenders

More Details Uncovered On Bogus Defamation Lawsuits Being Used To Delist Negative Reviews

from the not-helping-with-the-'rep-mgmt-not-a-SCAM'-arguments dept

Paul Alan Levy has gone digging and possibly found one of the entities tied to the bogus defamation suits being used to delist negative reviews. Working with Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy (where this article is cross-posted), Levy has discovered even more lawsuits being filed against nonexistent defendants to expedite the removal of content from the web.

There are about 25 court cases throughout the country that have a suspicious profile:

All involve allegedly self-represented plaintiffs, yet they have similar snippets of legalese that suggest a common organization behind them. (A few others, having a slightly different profile, involve actual lawyers.)

All the ostensible defendants ostensibly agreed to injunctions being issued against them, which often leads to a very quick court order (in some cases, less than a week).

Of these 25-odd cases, 15 give the addresses of the defendants — but a private investigator hired by Professor Volokh (Giles Miller of Lynx Insights & Investigations) couldn’t find a single one of the ostensible defendants at the ostensible address.

As Levy and others (namely Pissed Consumer) have noted recently, this practice seems to be on the upswing, along with the hasty creation of bogus "news" sites to assist in the generation of bogus DMCA takedowns targeting unflattering reviews and posts.

The standard M.O. for these bogus defamation lawsuits is described here in yet another case uncovered by Volokh and Levy.

A California newspaper writes a story in 2013 about an elementary school parent who had put fake signatures and falsely attributed quotes on a petition. (The petition was urging the school not to change its gifted education program.) The newspaper quotes the parent as apologizing for her actions.

Two and a half years later, a comment appears on the story: The comment, signed “Robert Castle,” accuses the parent of being prejudiced and taking bribes, though it also says the commenter is drunk and isn’t sure he’s talking about the same person that the story describes.

Then, within a few months, a lawsuit is filed in Shasta County — not where the incident happened — against supposed Shasta County resident “Robert Castle,” claiming the comment is defamatory, and alleging that Castle agrees to an injunction. (The Baltimore, Rhode Island, and California lawsuits share a good deal of legal boilerplate.)

That's where the story would normally end. Once the injunction is approved, the order is forwarded to search engines for the delisting of the URL cited. This one, however, almost has a twist.

Instead of just granting the injunction, the judge demands that the parties come in for a hearing, noting, among other things, that “there is a purported signature of Defendant Robert Castle” but no proof that such a defendant was served.

If only this had moved forward. But the lawyers filing these bogus suits aren't stupid. (Or at least they're not completely braindead.) Like others in the trolling business, these lawyers are greeting pushback from judges as something to be routed around, rather than addressed.

The docket does not report that the hearing was ever held; instead, a similar case is then filed in Los Angeles County, also far from the scene of the underlying incident, with the same plaintiff and the same defendant. An injunction is indeed issued. Yet as best we can tell no Robert Castle lives in Shasta County.

More details have also surfaced in a case Levy is still dealing with -- the filing of a bogus defamation lawsuit on behalf of dentist Mitul R. Patel against an unhappy patient. In this peculiar case, both the supposed plaintiff and defendant claim to have had their signatures forged on the court documents used to secure an order to delist content.

Patel's motion to vacate the bogus lawsuit points a finger at a reputation management firm SEO Profile Defense LLC -- led by Richart Ruddie -- which Patel alleges filed the suit (and forged his signature) without his knowledge after he signed a contract with it for reputation management services.

Additional details uncovered by Levy and Volokh suggest this isn't the reputation management firm's first bogus lawsuit rodeo.

We have likewise obtained confirmation that Profile Defenders, a Richart Ruddie company, was hired by two of the plaintiffs in the other cases that fit the pattern we described in the opening paragraphs.

The earliest case that we could find fitting this general pattern was filed in November 2015 — and it had as the plaintiff R. Derek Ruddie in Owings Mills, Maryland. Richart Ruddie was apparently born in Owings Mills, and Derrek (though with two r's) appears to be his middle name; the address given in court documents has been associated with Richart Ruddie in various records. And the monthly payments under the reputation management contract signed by Rescue One Financial are to be made to Ruddie’s company at a bank located in Owings Mills.

The defendant in this November 2015 case, true to form, could not be found at the address listed in the court documents. The lawsuit itself succeeded in using a comment, ostensibly derogatory of Ruddie — though it didn’t use Ruddie’s last name — to get a whole RipOffReport.com post deindexed. (The comment was, “Hey Rich whats the deal with this guy you recommended? Does he give you a kick back or something?”) That RipOffReport post was critical of a lawyer, who we assume was the main beneficiary of the November 2015 lawsuit. The lawyer has declined to say whether he had any reputation management agreement with Ruddie.

Ruddie's Profile Defenders has recently announced a "lawsuit removal service" in a grammatically-challenged press release. (All errors in the original.)

The future of online reputation management is moving into permanent removals. As the best online reputation management company thanks to the highest success rate int he industry Profile Defenders decided that the best future move for their clients was to go beyond just traditional suppression work of pushing down unwanted search results in favor of good ones.

[...]

Jordan a reputation analyst stated that "While we are still the best for suppression we wanted to go above & beyond what our clients wants and needs are and that involved completely removing and getting rid of search results. Most clients are astonished with the end result. Just yesterday we had a client who said he had used 4 other reputation companies and did not think it was possible and he is glad that profile defenders proved him wrong and doing the impossible." The most common site that we have been able to remove has been Ripoffreport.com. Being the only company that can currently guarantee removals from there has been a boom to our business. While the pricing is not cheap you are certainly paying for what you get.

Ruddie and Profile Defenders have refused to comment on any the allegations nor provided more specifics about the services they offer (which start at $6,000), but the PD website proudly declares the vaguely-defined "service" is a hit -- again using grammar best described as "outsourced."

Reviews on our lawsuit removal service is a top hit from all of our clients. From big time corporations to innocently defamed victims who have suffered from cyber stalkers and anonymous posters who decided to create harmful material about them online have agreed that our service for removing things that are bad or negative about you online is as good as it gets. Our lawsuit service has our internet defamation specialists setup with you for handling the removal of any material that is currently harming you.

What we are able to do for the removal has been nothing short of astonishing to most of our clients. Since anybody can hide behind a curtain and write whatever they would like online on popular consumer advocacy and review websites it is no stopping what appears online at first. That was until we created a service to help facilitate the legal aspect that is needed to have your bad information reviewed. We have to be vague on the details legally until we speak with you and put you in touch with the proper defamation attorney in your locale to handle your case.

For more information fill out the form to the left or give us a call today.

[Not pictured existent: form to the left.]

That's where things stand now. Some people in the SEO/reputation management business have found a legal loophole that seems to be working for the time being. Pushing unchallenged libel suits through lower courts is likely a low-risk activity, given the existence of more difficult and time-consuming cases sitting on most dockets. Unfortunately, as Levy points out, a case currently in front of the California Supreme Court could make California the bogus lawsuit venue of choice.

[T]he possibility of such shenanigans bears on the Hassell v. Bird litigation that is now before the California Supreme Court: The issue there (see here and here) is whether takedown injunctions can actually be made legally binding on Internet platforms, rather than just being something that platforms choose whether to follow. The questionable nature of many such injunctions is reason to further insist that platforms not be legally bound by them.

DMCA takedowns have always lent themselves to abuse. Now, unfortunately, the judicial system is helping out bad actors in the reputation management business for taking down more content, however inadvertently. This is why people claiming that CDA 230 needs a DMCA-style "takedown" system are wrong.

Filed Under: court orders, defamation, litigation abuse, reputation management, reviews, richart ruddie, takedowns
Companies: profile defenders

Bogus Defamation Lawsuit Using Fake Plaintiff And Defendant Challenged By Public Citizen

from the managing-reputations-right-into-the-ground dept

More evidence has surfaced that the online reputation management business is shady as all hell. Previously, we've covered the use of fake websites used to generate bogus DMCA takedowns by copy-pasting negative reviews in full and claiming these were the original works of bogus contributors by backdating the posts. We've also covered the even shadier and more legally-dubious tactic of filing bogus lawsuits -- using both fake plaintiffs and fake defendants -- to obtain court orders to delist negative reviews, bypassing the site where they're actually hosted in attempts to force Google, Yahoo, Bing, et al. to make them vanish from search results.

Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen -- thanks to the investigative skills of FIRE employee/Popehat contributor Adam Steinbaugh -- has uncovered another bogus libel lawsuit targeting negative reviews and comments. The standard M.O. is in effect. "Plaintiff" magically locates person behind anonymous review and gets them to sign a retraction. This legal paperwork never makes its way to the site where the review is actually hosted, however. The court order obtained through bogus means is instead served to search engines, resulting in the desired effect: the vanishing of negative content.

This follows closely on the heels of a bogus lawsuit in which the person whose name appears as a plaintiff claimed to have no input in the legal proceedings. While the jury (not the courtroom one) is still out on those claims, in this case it's been confirmed that the supposed plaintiff had nothing to do with the lawsuit containing his apparently forged signature.

After I wrote about the Patel case, I heard privately from Adam Steinbaugh, who sent me copies of some papers he had located on the ECF site of the US District Court for the District of Rhode Island – a complaint along with a “consent motion” and a proposed “consent order,” also signed by a pro se plaintiff and defendant, that contained some awkward phrasings that are suspiciously similar to the language in the Patel v. Chan papers. This time, though, instead of directing that the order be sent to the site hosting the comments – this time, the "Get Out of Debt Guy" web site, a blog about the debt relief industry which has a policy of not removing comments, preferring that the poster make a public retraction — the “consent order” provided that it was to be provided to Google and other search engines so that the entire article (which was not alleged to have anything tortious) could be removed from search engine databases.

Levy happens to know the owner of the site indirectly targeted by the bogus lawsuit. Steve "Get Out of Debt Guy" Rhode reached out to the supposed plaintiff in the lawsuit, Bradley Smith. Smith claims the signature on the lawsuit is not his own.

In addition, the defendant -- located mysteriously swiftly by the apparently fake "Bradley Smith" -- is also a fraud. There's no indication the person named in the lawsuit -- "Deborah Garcia" -- had anything to do with the negative comments targeted. Somehow, "Bradley Smith," acting on his own without the benefit of compelled discovery, managed to locate the person behind the comments and obtain her signature on a proposed consent order. Even more magically, the supposed commenter resides in a state with a very long statute of limitations.

Among other things, anonymous comments said nothing about Bradley Smith, although the blog article to which they were posted criticized Smith's company. Another oddity – neither of the URL’s that the “consent order” called on Google to delist was the article to which the comments were posted, although one of them featured comments supposedly received from “Bradley Smith” (whose authenticity Rhode had contested in these comments) And then there was the name of the defendant – the articles were posted using generic pseudonyms, yet plaintiff had apparently managed to identify the commenter by some mysterious means, and by some coincidence both comments had the same author, and she happened to be located in Rhode Island, where the statute of limitations for defamation is three years!

Unfortunately for whoever's behind this bogus lawsuit, Steve Rhode was able to determine the information claimed in the filing was bogus.

Garcia’s supposed residence also justified claiming diversity jurisdiction, yet the blog host could tell that the IP addresses for both comments were in California; and the address listed on the documents for Garcia does not exist.

Even more unfortunately for the entity behind the bogus, apparently forged filing, Public Citizen has chosen to pick up the case. It's attempting to intervene on behalf of Steve Rhode -- not just because the filing is clearly bogus, but also because the plaintiff (whoever that actually is) may have taken advantage of an extra-long statute of limitations, but overlooked a more critical factor.

As it turns out, assuming that the choice of Rhode Island as the venue may well have motivated by its unusually long limitations period for defamation claims, choosing to sue there was a colossal blunder in a different respect: like California, where Bradley Smith lives and whose anti-SLAPP statute is well-known, Rhode Island has a tough anti-SLAPP statute.   Today we have entered the Rhode Island case to help the Get Out of Debt Guy retain its access to search engine listings as a way of telling consumers about useful information on its web site. Thus, in addition to moving for leave to intervene and to vacate the judgment, we have moved to dismiss the complaint citing the anti-SLAPP provisions, which include an award of attorney fees. It seems to me that the facts here are sufficiently egregious that sanctions may be warranted on an inherent power or bad faith litigation theory.

The upshot -- so far -- is that Google is taking a bit more skeptical look at court orders telling it to delist content even though it's not named as a defendant in the lawsuit. The other upshot is that Levy and others are getting closer to identifying the entities behind this extremely shady misuse of the court system to clean up online reputations.

Filed Under: bradley smith, court order, defamation, fake lawsuits, paul levy, reputation management, scams, steve rhodes
Companies: public citizen

Bogus Defamation Lawsuit With Fake Defendant Results In Negative Reviews Of Dentist Being Taken Down

from the yet-another-abuse-of-the-legal-system dept

Earlier this year, complaint site Pissed Consumer noticed a disturbing new trend in the dark art of reputation management: unnamed rep management firms were using a couple of lawyers to run bogus defamation lawsuits through a local court to obtain court orders demanding the removal of "defamatory" reviews.

What was unusual wasn't the tactic itself. Plenty of bogus defamation lawsuits have been filed over negative reviews. It's that these lawsuits were resolved so quickly. Within a few weeks of the initial filing, the lawsuit would be over. Each lawsuit improbably skipped the discovery process necessary to uncover anonymous reviewers and proceeded straight to judgment with a (bogus) confessional statement from each "reviewer" handed in by the "defamed" entity's lawyer for the judge's approval. Once these were rubber stamped by inattentive judges, the lawyers served Google with court orders to delist the URLs.

To date, no one has uncovered the reputation management firm behind the bogus lawsuits. In each case, the companies purporting to be represented by these lawyers were shells -- some registered as businesses on the same day their lawsuits were filed.

It's one thing to do this sort of thing from behind the veil of quasi-anonymity afforded by the use of shell companies. It's quite another to file a bogus lawsuit with an apparently forged signature (of the supposed defamer) under your own name. But that's exactly what appears to have happened, as detailed in this post by Public Citizen's Paul Alan Levy.

In addition to posting his reviews of Mitul Patel on Yelp, [Matthew] Chan posted on RateMDs, kudzu.com and Healthgrades.com about his unsatisfactory experiences with Dr. Patel.   Chan’s is but one of a number of negative reviews directed at Patel on these various sites, but Patel apparently took particular umbrage at this one: he filed a pro se libel action claiming, in highly conclusory terms, that the reviews were false and defamatory.

It doesn't get much more conclusory than this filing [PDF], which runs only three pages -- with one page containing nothing more than a date and a signature. The complaint lists the URLs of Chan's reviews, says they're defamatory... and that's basically it. No part of the reviews are quoted as evidence of defamation. The filing simply declares every review defamatory and demands an injunction. But that's the kind of detail you can omit when you know you're never going to have to confront the accused in court.

[I]nstead of suing Chan in Georgia, Patel filed in the circuit court for the city of Baltimore, Maryland, a court that would ordinarily have no personal jurisdiction over a Georgia consumer sued for criticizing a Georgia dentist. Patel justified suing there by identifying “Mathew Chan” as the defendant – note that the spelling of the given name is slightly different – and alleging that this Mathew Chan “maintains a primary residence located in Baltimore, Maryland.”

There's a problem with both the defendant named and the primary address. The name is misspelled, perhaps deliberately so. The address listed in the complaint is completely bogus.

The fact that the both the online docket for the case, and the “consent motion for injunction and final judgment” bearing a signature for “Mathew Chan,” list his address as 400 East Pratt St. in Baltimore implies to me that this is a case of deliberate fraud, because so far as I have been able to determine, 400 East Pratt Street is a downtown building that contains only offices, retail establishments and restaurants, but no residences.   

Despite these deficiencies, the lawsuit made it past a judge because it contained a supposed mea culpa from "Mathew Chan" of "400 East Pratt Street" admitting to the defamatory postings. This motion with the bogus signature and admission was approved by judge Philip S. Jackson, who also instructed "Mathew Chan" to issue notices to search engines to delist the URLs if removing the original reviews proved impossible.

The real Matthew Chan -- who posted the reviews -- had never heard of the lawsuit until after the injunction had already been approved and served. Yelp notified him of the court order it had received. Chan, who still lives in Georgia as far as he can tell, informed Yelp of the situation and the review site decided to reinstate his review. Other sites, however, took the order at face value and removed the reviews. It appears Yelp was the only site to reach out to Chan when presented with the court order -- something that doesn't exactly bode well for users of other review sites. If sites protected by Section 230 are in this much of a hurry to remove content, they're really not the best venues for consumers' complaints.

Somewhat surprisingly, Levy received a response (of sorts) from Mitul Patel's lawyer. They claim this is the first they've heard of the lawsuit filed in Patel's name targeting negative reviews of Patel's dentistry. This wasn't delivered in a comment or statement, but rather in the form of a retraction demand [PDF]. The opening paragraphs are inadvertently hilarious.

This letter is to advise you that I have been retained to represent Mitul Patel, DDS, regarding the contents of your blog, dated Friday, August 19, 2016, entitled "Georgia Dentist Mitul Patel Takes Phony Litigation Scheme to New Extremes Trying to Suppress Criticism".

Based upon a review of your blog, which has unfortunately gone viral, please be advised that the contents of your blog are grossly inaccurate, factually incorrect, and were obviously written for no other purpose but to gain publicity for your blog, and to willfully damage the name and reputation of Dr. Patel.

First, there's the pain of being Streisanded, embodied in the phrase "has unfortunately gone viral." That's the sort of thing that happens when negative reviews are mysteriously injunctioned into the cornfield. Then there's the stupid accusation the Streisanded hurl at those who expose questionable -- and possibly fraudulent -- behavior: that it was motivated by a thirst for internet points. The first statement is merely sad. The second is mostly just tiresome.

The retraction demand goes on to claim that this is the first Mitul Patel has heard of the lawsuit (filed in his name) as well. While this would seem unlikely, Levy points out that a reputation management company could have created plausible deniability by filing a pro se lawsuit under Patel's name (its own kind of fraud) but without notifiying him that this is how it poorly and illegally handles its reputation-scrubbing duties. Unfortunately for Patel, whoever was hired to do this has done further damage to the dentist's reputation while presumably charging him for making things better.

Levy, of course, will not be retracting the post. His response to the demand letter points out that it's rather curious no disavowal was made until after the blog post "unfortunately went viral."

I was not persuaded, however, by your suggestion that I should "retract" the blog post or apologize for it. After all, you acknowledge that much of what I had to say on the blog was true. But I also have qualms about your assertion that, before my blog post was published, Patel had no knowledge of the lawsuit in Baltimore, for two reasons. First, in the course of investigating before I published my article, I obtained from Yelp copies of emails from Mitul Patel to Yelp, attaching the Baltimore court order and asking that Chan's Yelp comments be deleted. I attach the copies of these emails. Yelp has told me that Patel used [email address retracted], the same email address that [rest of sentence retracted]. Unless the email addresses were spoofed, those emails suggest that your client knew about the court order and was trying to take advantage of it.

Moreover, before I posted my article on the blog, I placed two telephone calls to Patel's dental clinic to try to speak with him about the lawsuit; I told his receptionist why I was calling. In addition, on Wednesday, August 17, I sent your client an email message mentioning his lawsuit against Chan and spelling out my concerns. Although he did not call me back and did not reply to the email, I trust he saw the messages before I published my article on Friday.

Levy goes on to point out that it seems strange someone or some company would pay a $165 filing fee to file a bogus defamation lawsuit for Patel without ever informing him it was doing so. The only motivation possible would be a shady reputation management company engaging in shadier tactics because Patel's paying it more than it's shelling out in filing fees. Levy has requested Patel provide him the name of anyone he's hired to do reputation cleanup work or perform SEO optimization on his behalf.

So, it's not just DMCA notices being abused to "protect" dishonest entities' reputations. It's also the legal system, where there's very little compelling lower level judges to spend a few minutes scrutinizing bare bones complaints (and injunction motions) handed to them by shady plaintiffs.

Filed Under: bogus lawsuits, court orders, dentist, georgia, matthew chan, mitul patel, philip s. jackson, reputation management, reviews
Companies: yelp