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

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 formany businesses, who do not like negative reviews that are published about themon the Internet. However, removing consumer reviews from the Internet is adifficult process given that they are protected by the First Amendment.

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

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

Several other businesses and professionals who have been thesubject of negative reviews online have also employed the same fraudulentmachinery as Nevada Corporate Headquarters, as a means of removing thiscontent while evading detection and liability.

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

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

Defendant Doe Corporations, so called "reputation managementcompanies," conceived and organized the scam as an alternative way toremove negative posts in lieu of undergoing an adversarial proceeding. Severalother businesses and professionals have contacted these "reputationmanagement companies," which have used similar schemes to remove negativeconsumer reviews about them.

The other conspirators engaged attorneys Mark W. Lapham("Lapham") and Owen T. Mascott ("Mascott") to file sham lawsuits either by thesubjects of the negative reviews or by corporations that had no interest in theallegedly defamatory statements, against a defendant who most certainly wasnot the party that published the allegedly defamatory statements, and the partiesimmediately stipulated to a judgment of injunctive relief, so the conspirators couldprovide the order to Google and other search engines, thus achieving the goalof deindexing all pages containing negative reviews.

At first blush, Defendants' scam appears rather brilliant but incrediblyunethical. Now that Plaintiff has uncovered and exposed Defendants' unlawfuldeeds, Consumer Opinion LLC respectfully requests that this Court discipline themfor 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.

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