AN INVESTIGATION IS HIGHLY NEEDED TO SEE HOW MUCH DAMAGE 

ROR HAS DONE TO INTERNET BUSINESSES WITHOUT DOING THE 

REQUIRED RESEARCH FOR ACCURACY.

 

HOW CAN RIPOFFREPORT.COM BE TRUSTED?

 

Multi-Fit is a victim of RipOff Report.com

 

 

Ed Magedson Extortion Fraud $20,000 REWARD!

 

I went through the web and put together this very small site. It lacks the capabilities to post with multiple links, but I'm working on that. I just can't believe people could buy the drivel spouted by some of Ed's defenders. All of the evidence is there for anyone to see for themselves; court documents, write-ups in the paper and letters generated by Madedon himself.

Ed Magedson wouldn't let Federated post rebuttals on his sites, badbusinessbureau.com and ripoffreport.com, so they created their own to tell their side of the story. I might even volunteer to rework it for them. Ed uses his websites to extort money from honest businesses in return for testimonials from Ripoffreport.com.

I can prove to you that what I have said is true; I have found proof of everything that the bad-business-rip-off.com site says. While Magdeson's site is full of unsubstantiated claims and allegations, these other sites produce court records and legitimate publications covering a story. In addition, the only place you find complaints on Federated is on Ed's Site whereas there are multiple sites filled with accusations about Magdeson, his company and some of his associates. Do you honestly think these businesses are getting together to put out false information on Ed? Why are so many diverse individuals who have no contact with one another reporting the same kind of problems?

I don't know what kind of person Steve Miller is, I've never met the man or spoken to him. When however, did it become permissible in this country to extort,slander and lible a person's business,because we didn't like their personality?

Here is a rundown on the information I have accumulated so far.

It appears Magedson is a troubled individual whose past is littered with a pattern of law enforcement interventions, documented by incontroverted evidence, including:

 arrests (http://www.bad-business-rip-off.com/legalproblems.html)(http://www.bad-business-rip-off.com/rap1.html)(http://www.bad-business-rip-off.com/rap2.html)

absconding (fugitive warrant http://www.goodbusinessbureau.com/absconded.html)(http://www.ezripofflawsuit.com/)

law suits - News reports and legal documents of judgments - so much for his claim that he has never lost a lawsuit (http://www.bad-business-rip-off.com/judgment.html)(http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/07-25-2003/0001989115&EDATE=) (http://www.goodbusinessbureau.com/rap4.html)(http://www.superiorcourt.maricopa.gov/docket/civil/caseInfo.asp?caseNumber=CV2004-021685)

extortion (http://www.beiconline.com/index.htm)(http://selectyourgifts.com/ripoff.html) (http://www.beiconline.com/company.htm)(http://www.bad-business-rip-off.net/hycite.html)

Run out of town (News source) (http://www.bad-business-rip-off.com/piggy-bank.html)

undue influence on public officials resulting in judicial censure (http://www.bad-business-rip-off.com/eviction.html)

Ed is reported to consort with convicted pedophiles, extortionists, and other criminal elements. How many decent people do you know that associate with these kinds of people? (http://www.beiconline.com/ezbc_ripoff_criminals.htm)
(http://www.beiconline.com/ontherun.htm)

FBI Report - currently trying to obtain original document. In a recent report and in the process of giving out information on fugitives Robert and Pamela Kirchman, Ed Magedson was mentioned as a possible co-consirator in colusion with the Kirchmans to extort money from businesses via a website scam. Anyone with information on the wherabouts of any of these individuals is encouraged to contact the FBI in Staunton Virginia

Here is how Federated's involvement with the badbusinessbureau unfolded:
In 1999 a client had a misunderstanding with Federated. Instead of contacting them directly they posted a complaint on Ed's site. Another complaint was posted in 2000

Miller posted rebuttals to both complaints but Ed modified the report by removing the response to the complaints - you can see the reports for yourself as they originally were posted before Ed modified them by removing the rebuttals. (http://www.bad-business-rip-off.com/earlyoriginal.html)

Shortly after Magedson removed the response to the complaints he contacted Federated with an offer to post a positive report. It would cost $5,000 up front, plus a monthly monitoring fee of $1,500. They refused his shake-down and more complains began appearing on his site. The complaints all have the same grammar and spelling problems and sound suspiciously as though they were written by the same author - Ed Magedson!

In 2004 Federated filed a lawsuit against him. In response he offered to give Federated a good testimonial for 'a reduced fee $2,500 up front and a monthly monitoring fee of about $125 a month. At that time he told them ... The normal cost for the amount of Reports you have would be about $9,000 and much more of a monthly monitoring fee...An investigative Report by Rip-off Report...would be a very positive one, turning all the negatives into a positive. Anyone would want to do business with your company. You will wish there were more Rip-off Reports on you, ...NO joke..."

Also in 2004 Miller attempted to deliver personal service on him in relation to the law suit against him, but Ed is in hiding. Finally, a determined agent was able to locate him and had to drive 250 miles into the desert of Arizona to make delivery. He did not appear for the court hearing, so what is HE hiding. Federated was willing to face all allegations in open court.

In the meantime, other companies have had similar problems with Ed and his badbusinessbureau Rip Off scam. See if you notice a pattern.

Hy Cite Corporation fell victim to the extortion demands. They refused to write the $50,000 check to pay Ed off and instead filed suit in Arizona where he claims to do business. They won a $30,000 judgment against him which he has neither appealed nor paid a dime on.

Alyon Technologies Inc. of Wisconsin, filed suit in the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court in the High Court of Justice, Federation of Saint Christopher and Nevis where Ed set up his phony corporation in an effort to avoid lawsuits. The court of this foreign government awarded Alyon Technologies judgments totallying $10 Million in damages. Needless to say he has neither appealed nor paid on that judgment either.

When a disgruntled customer posted a complaint on a car sales company he mentioned, in passing, that he had also received a printed flyer from selectyourgifts.com. The gift certificate offered a free gift just for visiting the car lot. This man never ordered anything from selectyourgifts.com, or paid any money to selectyourgifts.com. Ed seized upon this comment however as a way to extort money from yet another company. They tried on several occasions to post rebuttals, but they were removed. They did speak with Ed however and were told that if they paid $5,000 the report would be amended to reflect a positive outcome, the car dealership however could not even buy themselves out of a bad report as Ed has admitted he 'hates car dealerships'.

Yet Ed himself has admitted in at least one newspaper article, "Taking money from businesses that bureaus are supposed to watch is a conflict of interest...

  Ed Magedson won't let anyone post rebuttals on his sites, badbusinessbureau.com and ripoffreport.com, so the affected businesses have created sites of their own as a forum to post their side of the story. 

Federated (as well as many of these other businesses) serve tens of thousands of people and their track record is exemplary.
See some of these other websites:
http://www.beiconline.com/index.htm
http://www.ezripofflawsuit.com/
http://selectyourgifts.com/ripoff.htlm
http://www.goodbusinessbureau.com/
http://sleazereport.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=5
http://www.rip-off-bad-business.com/served.html
http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/050105/078507.html
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/releas...elease_id=78507
http://finance.lycos.com/qc/news/st...1722_IWR_078507
http://www.planetfeedback.com
http://www.complaintstation.com
http://www.advisoryservicesinc.com/board/?topic=topic1&;msg=100
http://www.auctionhints.com/message/webbbs_config.pl?noframes;read=8049
http://www.senac.com/forums/13432/bin/740.htmlhttp://www.senac.com/forums/13432/bin/719.html
http://www.advisoryservicesinc.com/board/?topic=topic1&;msg=94
http://www.advisoryservicesinc.com/board/?topic=topic1&;msg=102
http://www.thecomplaintstation.com/cgi-bin/datacgi/database.cgi/Forum/Subtopic/TopicID=2659/SubtopicID=00052388/firstrecord=0/finalrecord=14/http://invisiblematrix.net/blog/archives/000423.html

 

 

 

ROR, in all its wisdom, has posted complaints from another Investigation Company, KMS Investigations Inc, and has falsely connected our business KMS Detective Agency as one of the same. Google is now carrying it front first page where our clients can see this crap. This is America for god’s sake. This ROR has no knowledge of anything with our company and we are in fact a brand new business.

 

This guy's site needs to be restructured and/or shut down. The Rip Off Report is a money making machine and there is nothing positive about it for anyone other than Ed and his bank account. Anyone can post anything bad about your company, whether it's true or not. So if you are a business owner in a competitive market (especially if you're a consumer based online company like us), your competition can post a few negative comments that could severely impact your business.

 

Looks like Ed Magedson's shill, Salty, is running scared. He and Ed Magedson must be looking over their shoulders and I don't blame them. The curtain is now coming down on their act. Lawsuit after lawsuit is being filed against Ed and his scam. Take a look at the following:

http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/050105/078507.html
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=78507
http://bad-business-rip-off.net/hy%20cite.Complaint%20(B0463373).PDF
http://www.rip-off-bad-business.com/served.html

Turn out the lights, the party's over.....

 

 

RIPOFF REPORT VICTIMS!
What to do if attacked by Ripoff Report, Ultra Dns, Puregig, Prolexic [snip]

1. Ripoff report was set up to be a site that is beneficial to consumers, but it is much more than that as you know. it is set up to also extort money from companies. Ripoff Report (ROR) takes anonymous complaints with no regard to the truth, slander or harassment and post them on the internet. Plus report it to the Arizona BBB.

BBB of Central, Northern & Western Arizona
WWW: http://maricopa.bbb.org
Email: info@arizonabbb.org
Phone: (602)264-1721
Fax: (602)263-0997
4428 N. 12th Street
Phoenix AZ 85014-4585

 

 

If you have good lawyer they can cut Ed's legs out from under him. By going after service providers! Ed is a ghost so you have to be crafty. There are many people that can stop Ed's service. Here is a list of people or companies that for now provide services to ED and ROR.
[snip]
She has accepted service for ED's legal matters. contact her
Jaburg & Wilk
3200 N. Central Ave
Phoenix , Az 85012
602-248-1000
B. Ultra DNS
Domain servers for ed's site:
UDNS1.ULTRADNS.NET 204.69.234.1
UDNS2.ULTRADNS.NET 204.74.101.1
ULTRA DNS
(650) 228-2300
support@ultadns.com
888-367-4820
C. Prolexic Tech.
They provide bandwidth
866-800-0366
abuse@prolexic.com
D. Puregig
provides a block of bandwidth for prolexic.
(602) 445-1850
Matt Wilson (general manager)
They will try to make you run in circles, but they have Terms of Service agreement with their customers.
4. Contact Google,yahoo,msn,lycos. they all have abuse departments. I got my ROR deindexed,but it took me a while. You have to e-mail and mainly call until you get something done. Use the same letter to each abuse department.
5. Don’t call Ed 602-518-4357 unless you want to. Only way to get any thing done with him is to pay.
6.Go for criminal case not just civil.
7. Have fun, be honest and get your story out there.
8.If you had a ripoff report on you being a child molester, crooked business pardon, or a bad mom you would get it removed. You would just pay ed.
9. How much $$$$$$ have you lost or like me why would you want lies out there. With no regards to truth. Remember he is advertising your company’s name in Meta tags without your permission. Then how else does your ROR get ranked so high.
10.Contact BBB.
11.Ed s llc
Xcentric ventures
P.O box 470
Tempe, Az 85280
(602) 518-4357
EDitor@ripoffreport.com
This can be waste of time since ed has po box and cell phone number listed.
12. St kitts is made up to make companies run in circles just like Hy-cite did. Ed's company is in Arizona and his service providers are in the USA. Plus, ed through his site does business in every state in the union. companies in Florida have been sueing ed in their state. PLUS, THEY ARE ABLE TO SERVE MARIA C. SPETH ANY LEGAL PAPERS.
13. HAMMER!!! on the T.O.S (terms of service provision at all internet companies).
Look at the content of the post and see if it is in violation of their own policy. Why do they have this policy if they are protected by the 1996 act. LoL
14. If you know any information about Ed and ripoff report please post in any forum or message board or do it here.
15. [snip] got all irate when we contacted there other service provider Sterling networks
602-682-2200
abuse@sterlingnetwork.com
Now it seems like they (ROR) are no longer customers of sterling networks. Good stuff!!!
16.It sucks having people post things on the internet anonymously.
17. Hope alot of you can read more into this post.
18. Do not let Ed get away with his scheme. Do something. We can easily get this taken care of if we all do something. Just how does it feel when you put your company name in a search engine and you see a Ripoff report there.
19. Here are legal judgments on ed magedson and ripoff report
http:www.superiorcourt.maricopa.gov/docket/civil/caseinfo.asp?caseNumber=CV1995-004052
and CV2004-021685. There is probably more.
20. 17th Judicial court
Broward county Florida
case no: 04-17721-21
Ed magedson and xcentric ventures LLc is the defendant.
21. There are probably more . Just post if you find out any info. If ed jumps service providers or any is filled in court (anywhere) .
22. It is very hard for ed to switch service providers!

 

 

As noted by 97th Floor’s Chris Bennett in his exposé of Rip Off Report, Google has an ongoing romance with the site that has allowed many unvalidated complaint webpages to damage other businesses by their presence in the organic rankings.   Where MSN refuses to list their site by principle and Yahoo barely at all, Google allows ROR to run rampant across its top ten, damaging companies irreparably in the process.  But a closer examination suggests Google’s acceptance of ROR goes far beyond that.  If taking away a negative has the equivalent effect of adding a positive, it seems Google is using Rip-off Report as a tool to help its own cash flow. 

I’m not going to get into ROR’s strangely allowed violations of Google’s Terms Of Service, which has been covered elsewhere ad nauseum.   Before I get to the facts of what I’ve found, however, I do want to show how ROR’s title tag structure is essentially defamation. 

ROR would be the first to tell you that they don’t produce the content featured on their site, which is how they’re able to skirt lawsuit after lawsuit.  The Communications Decency Act states that a website can’t be held responsible for content submitted by others - and that’s a good thing.  No one wants to be held accountable for some unsolicited comment someone made on a blog.  But regardless of what’s posted by those initiating the reports, ROR’s title tag structure (which they have full control of) is such that it slanders a business simply because a report was generated.  The slander I’m talking about is what makes an ROR report so visible in the search results. 

ROR’s title tag structure follows this pattern: Rip-off Report: Business Name Here 

In the search engine results, (Google being the only engine that allows ROR to rank), this has the effect of painting any reported business as having committed a “rip off”.  Logic follows that there can’t be a “Rip-off Report” unless a rip-off has occured.  Webster’s defines a “rip-off” as: “an act or instance of stealing”.  ROR’s title tags are essentially saying: “Reported For Stealing: Business Name Here”.  Do you think it would be damaging if “Reported For Stealing: Your Name Here” showed up on a Google search for your name regardless of the validity of the claim?

But looking further into the definition of “rip-off”, how does it apply to the majority of the consumer complaints on the site?  Some reports are blatantly false and unmerited, but even those which do involve a real life dissatisfied consumer have nothing to do with theft.  If a customer and business have an issue with a documented return policy, is that stealing on the part of the company?  If an ex-employee perceives he or she was wrongfully terminated and decides to tell their story, is that stealing?  I would estimate that very few (if any) of the reports listed on ROR are anywhere near the textbook definition of a “rip off”.  

Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter whether a business or individual deserves to be there.  As soon as an ROR listing shows up for them, they’re damaged regardless.   If you’re thinking of buying products or services from “XYZ Corporation”, and you see “Rip-off Report: XYZ Corporation”, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll buy elsewhere.  While the American legal system promises “innocence until proven guilty”, individuals rarely think along those lines when they see inflammatory words such as “rip-off’.  But for the sake of argument, let’s assume for a moment that every single Rip-off report ever filed is the gospel truth. 

Imagine, if you will, the following scenarios:

A) An electronics dealer sells 100 pieces of audio equipment a year and has 4 rip off reports within that year

B) An electronics dealer sells 100 pieces of audio equipment a day and has 4 rip off reports within one year

In scenario A, the dealer has a dissatisfaction rate of 4%, which means there are probably twice as many customers out there who either would complain if they knew where to do so, or, are simply too lazy to do so.  That’s an estimated 8% of dealer A’s customers.  In short, if eleven people deal with dealer A, one is likely to be dissatisfied.  One out of eleven isn’t a very good record.  I wouldn’t want to shop with Dealer A if I were privy to these numbers.

In scenario B, the dealer has a dissatisfaction rate of .01%.  If the same assumptions we made for Dealer A apply, Dealer B has a real disatisfaction rate of .02%, which means that 1 person out of every 5,000 is dissatisfied.  Find me an Ebay dealer of any product with a record that good and I’ll show you someone I would be happy and confident to buy from.     

But guess what?  It doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t matter because most people who see an ROR report in the listings will do what we all do when we see an inflammatory phrase associated with an entity…make an initial judgement toward that entity regardless of the facts.  

Looking at it from another perspective, let’s say you’re on jury duty in a criminal proceeding, and you hear testimony from a witness against the accused.  The last question the defense’s lawyer asks the witness is, “have you ever been convicted of rape?”, to which he answers, “yes”.  Most people, myself included, would almost immediately discount his testimony based on his affirmative answer to the question.  But what if the man, who is now 40 years old, was convicted of statutory rape at 17 years of age when he was involved with his 16 year old, consenting girlfirend.  What if he and the girl eventually married, had 4 children and are still happily married to this day?  What if the man had lived an otherwise upstanding life, paid his taxes on time and never had any trouble with the law since he was 17.  Does that make a difference?   I think it would for most people, because even though the law might be clear on what constitutes a rapist, there’s a colossal difference between the witness in the preceeding story and a guy dressed in black sneaking into houses at night with the premeditated intent to sexually assault someone. 

Likewise, there’s a collosal difference between a reported 4.0% rate of complaint and a .01% rate of complaint.  But again, it matters not.  ”Rip-off” is a phrase with a very negative connotation that implies something far more damaging than a complaint.  Though “rapist” probably isn’t the best analogy, the point remains that certain words fuel our hatred and anger like no other.  In the world of business, and especially on the heels of Enron and Bernie Madoff, “rip-off” is definitely one of those words.  Take this, in combination with the fact that anyone can make up anything they want about anyone else and get away with it on Rip Off Report, and you can see how Google is being highly irresponsible by allowing this to continue. 

Rip Off Report should be required to alter/rename their site to indicate something more truthful in their tags or Google needs to devalue the site.  I guess the title tag, “Complaints that May or May Not Be Valid: Business Name Here” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.   

So why hasn’t Big Brother taken action? 

Good question.  An even better question is why some ROR pages with the same age have high page PR and other’s don’t, yet an inbound link search reveals no external inbound links for either page and the same number of internal links.  Could it be that ROR uses a robot.txt to keep from passing site PR to certain pages?  Considering their well known extortionist “mediation service”, it wouldn’t suprise me.  Still, that’s not something Google can control.  To see what Google can control, let’s take a look at one of Google’s premier advertisers.

Blue Nile is one of the highest PPC spenders on the net, and Google appreciates them so much for it that they often use Blue Nile to test out new platforms - oddly at times when it provides them a significant competitive advantage.  Over the holiday season 2008, Google allowed Blue Nile to place ads that dropped down their products within the ad itself, giving them a ridiculously unfair advantage over their competitors at a time when sales are at their peak.  Why, you may ask?  Because Blue Nile is the cash cow that keeps on giving.  The company did $350 million in business in 2008, and it’s not a stretch to say that a very significant amount of money went to Google via Adwords. 

I won’t link to any ROR on principle, but you can easily find Blue Nile’s ROR (PR 1) by typing in “Blue Nile Rip Off Report” in Google.  The thing is, you’ll NEVER find it in the organic listings for “Blue Nile”.  You can go ten pages deep where the listing all have no page rank whatsoever and you still won’t see it.   

Another online Jeweler, Zale Corporation, is yet another Adwords big spender.  Google loves their money so much they decided to test a geographic ad testing option with them.  Unlike Blue Nile with two ROR’s, Zale corporation has 69 rip off reports.   You won’t find any of those in the top 100 search results either.  Think about it…69 complaints means at least some degree of interlinking within the already PR blessed ROR, and yet few of Zales ROR’s have any page rank whatsoever.  It’s almost as though someone paid to have the PR removed.  Still, some do have page rank, and yet we see the same situation as with Blue Nile.  Plenty of pages with 0 page rank come up well before these damaging listings.  Let me reiterate that point.  These ROR’s aren’t pushed back by better listings a la some SEO strategy to boost the positive press.  These company’s ROR’s with page rank don’t outrank pages with 0 page rank from sites with low to no page rank.  These pages have no inbound links and are located on “bottom of the barrel” sites, yet they still outrank Blue Nile and Zales Corporation ROR’s. If I built a brand new site tomorrow expressely to rank for either of these company’s names, it likely would outrank their ROR’s.  Something smells rotten in Denmark, my friends. 

(On a side note, you also won’t find ”Zales Complaints” in the “Searches Related To:” options at the bottom of the first search results page, which has nothing to do with ROR and everything to do with Google.  A quick look on Trellian reveals that “Zales complaints” does show some search volume while “Zales Canada”, which is listed at the bottom of the page, shows none.   I don’t think either of the Keyword Discovery sets of numbers are accurate, but I do think they’re fairly reliable in terms of showing that one phrase is searched more often than another.)  

The problem is, Google appears to be giving an unfair advantage to their premier advertisers by devaluing their ROR’s.    

I manage PPC and SEO for a popular online jeweler, which is why I’m well aware of how my competition’s bad press is virtually buried.  Unlike Blue Nile and Zales, however, I opted not to heed the call to up my Adwords spend despite direct contact from an Adwords representative.   As you can easily read about with a quick search, generic jewelry PPC terms are highly competitive, cost a lot of money and yield very little in the way of profits - which is why most companies bid within their own brand.  Bidding on generic “diamond” related terms is a great way to end up with a money losing ROAS.  So, like “Ice.com” (whose gripe with Adwords you can read about here) and other jewelers, I opted to do what was fiscally sound for my client and cut a substantial portion of their spend that had shown low to no production over time.  Our spend dropped considerably when my management took over, though our profitability went up and our ROI was much improved.  Everyone was happy except the fine folks at Google, who lost out on the spend that was being wasted.   Blue Nile bids for the number one spot on every single “Diamond” related term you can think of.  While there may be a sound branding strategy behind that logic, no one can argue that the end result is an overwhelmingly high spend at the end of each month.   

So what does that have to do with ROR? 

As you might guess, we have some ROR complaints too.  Far, far less than Zales, but ours manage to rank smack-dabbady-doo right in the middle of page 1 of the search results.  How do we manage such attention from both ROR and Google when we obviously have a far better track record than Zales?  Good question.  It isn’t that they have more press or relevant listings, as parts of my client’s name are shared by hundreds of companies and they have plenty of overall press.  You can find high PR pages well into the 30th to 40th listings of the search results for our name on Google just as you can for our competitors.  Still, our ROR’s have higher PR and consequently higher rankings than our competitors yet nothing distinguishes our ROR’s from theirs.  Not inbound or internal links, not meta data, not age…not anything other than the fact that they are big Adwords spenders and we are not.  One site with a ranking page on my client has a site PR of 9 while ROR has a site PR of 6 and there is no discernable difference between the internal linking structures of the sites, yet the ROR page outranks the competing page with the exact same PR.  The two competitors mentioned above have ROR’s that can’t outrank a back-nine page on a site created last Tuesday.      

Before I go further, let me put my client’s industry in relation to ROR reports in perspective.  Jewelry is a hard business for those of you who aren’t familiar.  It’s even harder for companies like my client’s, Zales and Blue Nile, who sell online.  First and foremost, it’s much easier to comparison shop online, which means a competitive jeweler’s margins get thinner and thinner as the dollar amount of the item goes up.  Second, a very common issue in the jewelry industry is that local jewelers have a tendency to appraise the value of something a person bought far away (i.e. “online”) at less than the actual value in an effort to get a person to return the item and buy from them.  They wouldn’t dare give a bad appraisal to their competitor across the street because they know they’d have to answer for it, but there’s nothing to fear from someone half a world away.  The point is that I’m not suggesting Blue Nile or Zales are less than reputable companies.  They both do high volume business and there are bound to be a few customers that feel they didn’t get a fair deal when you have thousands of salespeople and millions of dollars in transactions each year. 

What I am saying is that my client’s business is like so many others out there who have been hurt and maligned by a front page listing indicating some sort of “rip-off” has occured.   We have a rate of complaint that any corporation would die for (under .003%), but most people who see that listing will never know that fact or care to find out.  Even if they read the ROR’s, which customers may or may not update regardless of what we do, they won’t see that we’ve tried to remedy every single complaint filed just as we would for any customer (though I have to say…a few who filed ROR’s were clearly in the wrong, completely misrepresented the situation to make my client look unfavorable and what they asked for was well above and beyond what any reasonable retailer would allow).   The fact is, that listing above the fold and a few spaces under our listing brands us as something we are not, which is a “Rip-off”.  How many other businesses have been unfairly branded a “rip-off” through the existence of ROR listings in Google’s search results?  Quite a few. 

If Google wants to continue to keep ROR in the forefront by granting it trust rank, then the playing field needs to be level.  As explained above, our ROR’s have no more age or inbound links than either Blue Nile or Zales ROR’s, yet the PR for one of our ROR’s is much higher than any of their 71 combined.  I hate to say it, but either Rip-off Report, Google, or both are manipulating the listings.  There is no way our competition’s reports don’t merit the same PR our reports do being in the exact same category with the exact same internal linking structure and the exact same internal and external links.  Furthermore, our competitor’s few ROR reports that do have gauged “PR bar” page rank can’t seem to outrank PR 0 pages with no age.  I am firmly convinced that Google is keeping damaging Rip-off reports far away from their premier advertisers, which is the equivalent of accentuating the rankings of those reports that damage their premier advertiser’s competition.      

A few last points of interest:

A) Blue Nile’s ROR was ranked on page 6 until recently, when I posted the above findings on the subject to the comments section of SEO moz’s “The Anatomy of a Ripoff Report Lawsuit“.  Even on page 6, it had more PR and age than some of the other surrounding listings yet only got as close to the top ten as 5 pages back.  It is now nowhere to be found.      

B) You may be wondering, “Why is this post on an education site?” or “Why don’t you say the name of your client?”  The short answer is that I’ve heard far too many complaints from business owners who have made their dissatisfaction with Google known regarding a Rip-off Report and soon thereafter found the ROR’s rankings above those for their own brand.  Look around for yourself. I certainly take everything I read on the internet with a grain of salt, but it isn’t hard to find multiple comments from ROR victims who expressly state that complaining to Google made the issue far worse.  My purpose here isn’t to make things worse for my client, but to call out Google (to whatever degree one small guy can) for what appears to me to be blatant use of ROR as a tool. 

C) You may also be wondering, “Is this linkbaiting?”.  The answer is no.  In an effort to discern why my client had been singled out with an ROR listing whilst their bigger Adwords spending competitors had been left unscathed, I came across a lot of business owners who have been hurt by Google via ROR (many with no serious justification for it whatsoever - 97th Floor being a perfect example).   Do I want it to get attention and inbound links so it will get more attention in the long run?  Yes, but not for the purpose of boosting this site, which is unrelated to the subject matter and not owned by me.  I want the article to get attention so that those who need to devalue ROR will hopefully be shamed into doing so for the benefit of my client and all businesses who have been damaged unfairly by ROR.  It’s probably wishful thinking, but a part of me really wants to retain the belief that the net can be a level playing field for all.  It can’t be level as long as Google is using ROR by skewing search results to hide their reports for some businesses while putting them front and center for others.  Because of the fact that anyone with any motive can create an ROR and because Google gives them so much trust, ROR is not a fair or just proposition to begin with, but that’s amplified when some businesses are immune from their reports while others have to wear them like an albatross around the neck.   

D) I noiced that anytime a “fight ROR” thread gets popular, it starts to generate what I call “crazy posts”, which are posts by people who seem to be on the verge of a mental breakdown.  The last thing I want to do is come across like one of those people or a conspiracy theorist, but I seriously think there’s something behind it.   Pardon my use of the phrase “whackjob”, but the more “whackjobs” that post on comment threads related to what ROR is doing to hurt legitimate businesses, the more it makes the entire argument look like it was created by people who want to imagine they’re being persecuted.   It reduces the credibility of the article and all those who respond to it, which is too bad because a lot of innocent business owners and individuals with the best of intentions have been damaged by Rip-off Report.  I don’t want to post comments, because sooner or later it ends up in call for a class action lawsuit, and not suprisingly, that’s when the crazy people come out in droves to post.  Coincidence?  Methinks not.   Comments also bring out those who defend Rip-off Report.  Their primary argument is that businesses who are the subject of bogus reports can’t be that damaged and even if they are, it’s an acceptable loss in light of all the consumers that have been helped by ROR.  To me, this argument stinks of “Let’s just assume everyone’s guilty and imprison them all.  Sure, a few innocents will live out their lives in prison, but what’s the suffering of a few in the face of the needs of the many”.  Let me tell you, it’s easy to take this cowardly line of thinking when it’s not YOUR BUSINESS or YOUR REPUTATION on the line.  Once it is, people with this attitude tend to change their attitude rather quickly.   While I will approve comments on either side of the argument for discussion, no “crazy posts” will be approved.

E) Undoubtedly, some of you will think that my claiming Google has anything to do with ROR for their own gain is absurd.  What you need to understand is that specific Adwords advertisers represent a sizeable portion of their bread and butter.  The strange way in which those advertiser’s ROR reports are MIA in the search results leads me to think the worst.  I don’t know if what I believe to be true is institutional or the result of a backdoor handshake from a Google higher-up, but I do know that some rankings just don’t add up based on the pattern set for other, similar pages from the exact same site.  Regardless of what I think, Google is still culpable.  Yes, Rip-off report has been accused of some very questionable (and illegal) behavior on the net and in court, but Google is ultimately responsible for giving them license to cause harm to those who are innocent of any wrongdoing - especially when other search engines saw the writing on the wall with ROR long ago.  Let me repeat that: Google still empowers ROR while their competitors long ago realized the potential for misuse and took action.  What I’m suggesting is that you ask yourself why?  Why would Google do nothing when their closest competitors have devalued ROR?   Is it for the integrity of the web?  I don’t think you can use that argument for a website that hides behind the Communications Decency Act because it knows that the great majority of the complaints published on it are one-sided falsehoods manipulated through the site’s format to cause as much damage as possible.  So again, why?  There’s a reason for everything and there’s definitely a reason for Google allowing ROR to run roughshod over so many businesses yet conveniently be a non-factor for other businesses who are a big part of Google’s revenue stream.  This article only covers an industry I’m familiar with, but I would imagine those in other industries could probably find similar instances if they took the time to look.  Find me a noted high dollar Adwords advertiser and I’ll show you a business with Rip-off Reports that won’t rank.

F) You may be wondering if I feel that no ROR reports are merited.  I feel as though there are probably many that are merited, but that doesn’t solve or excuse the problem of even one report being allowed to cause harm if unmerited.  The long and short of it is that some complaints on ROR are part of a pattern of legitimate complaints and represent a real problem within a particular organization - and those complaints deserve to be heard.  Some are flat-out fabricated, and those deserve to be ignored.  Finally, some are legitimate but may be representative of the experience of less than .0001% of a company’s total customers, which makes them not very representative at all.  ROR doesn’t do ANYTHING to find out which of these scenarios is accurate, which is why MSN and Yahoo decided to devalue them.  Better to let 100 guilty go free than wrongly convict one, although in this case, I think a lot more innocent people and businesses are having their good reputations damaged for no real reason than the other way around.  I don’t take issue with a site such as Rip-off report as long as they play by the rules, which should include NOT offering to serve as a mediator for complaints at a cost (which seems to me to be an obvious conflict of interest); NOT naming their site and labeling their title tags in a defamatory way such as to imply guilt for those with reports; and finally to NOT pass PR on to interior pages subjectively, but uniformly.

Criticism and lawsuits

Ripoff Report's high rankings in the Internet search engines lead to frustration by some companies who feel they are being victimized by complaints that may or may not have any merit, and that Magedson solicits these complaints only for his own profit. Ripoff Report allows consumers to post complaints anonymously. Rebuttals by the accused companies are only published at Magedson's discretion.

Ripoff Report also allows individuals to post unconfirmed complaints and accusations against other individuals. Aggrieved individuals can submit their complaints against other individuals, and, after being screened for personal information and curse words (which are redacted), those statements are posted online with the expectation that public exposure will apply pressure to the targeted individual. The individual being accused usually has his or her full identity revealed while the poster remains anonymous. Ed Magedson said his staff only verifies the complainants' real names, which are kept confidential, and verifies that they have an actual email address. This practice has led to accusations of willful negligence by Magedson and Ripoffreport for ""falling short of what a reasonable person would do to protect another individual from foreseeable risks of harm." It has been argued that these loose verification practices encourage false claims and slander.

Ripoff Report does not allow complaints about its own services. However, there are a number of allegations against Ed Magedson and the Ripoff Report which are easily found online. Several sites have been erected which attack Ripoff Report and Magedson. Also many allegations have been posted on Internet message boards, including allegations that ripoffreport.com's search engine optimization tactics violate Google's terms of service.^{[2] [3][2]}

Many companies have sued Rip-off Report or Magedson.^{[7][8][9][10]} At any given moment there are always lawsuits pending against Ripoff Report. None of these cases have ever gone to trial. Some have been settled, and in other cases Ripoff Report has failed to appear to defend itself. In such cases, a default judgment is entered against Ripoff Report. Some suits can be reviewed at Citizen Media Law Project.^[11]

Several people and businesses listed on Ripoff Report have allegedly hired the Defamation Action League, an organization run by William L. "Bill" Stanley (possibly a pseudonym), who is listed as one of the world's top 200 spammers,^[12] to attempt to make Magedson and his business partners remove specific reports. In return, Magedson filed a lawsuit under RICO. On June 21, 2007 a preliminary injunction was granted against DefamationAction.com and ComplaintRemover.com. Stanley and his associates were found liable for defamation and making death threats. Robert Russo, who claims not to be part of the Stanley group -- but who does own ComplaintRemover.com, has filed an answer, defenses and a counter-suit in the case, which is in progress.^[13][14]

  

     Ripoff Report's Policy: Why We NEVER Remove Reports even if the report

    is false &/or inaccurate.

As is our policy, we never remove reports even when they are claimed to contain defamatory statements, and even if the original author requests it.

The reasons for this policy are simple.

First, this site is only effective when all complaints are maintained and preserved so that over time patterns of truly bad business practices are exposed. If we removed complaints this would give companies an incentive to pressure authors (or us) to remove true and accurate reports in exchange for money or simply to avoid a costly lawsuit. For that reason, we will never agree to remove reports, even if someone can show that a report is probably inaccurate. Under this policy, no reports are ever removed, so there is no benefit to companies who threaten or pressure a customer hoping to get them to retract a valid complaint. Even if this means that one or more questionable reports are left up, we think that removal of any reports would ultimately make this site less credible and thus less effective as a tool for educating consumers. That's why we have made this strict policy decision.

If this seems unfair or unreasonable, consider this -- if someone sues you in court and makes outlandish claims that are completely false, you can fight the case and win, and at the end of the case a judgment will be entered in your favor proving that you were right and your accuser was wrong. However, the court clerk will NOT destroy the file or seal the records of the case simply because you won. Even when a lawsuit is shown to be 100% baseless, the documents remain part of a public record that is maintained for years or perhaps forever (trust us -- we KNOW about this from first-hand experience). In this situation, the remedy you are entitled to is a court order or judgment proving that you did nothing wrong, not destruction of the public records about the case.

Ripoff Report
PO Box 310, Tempe, Arizona, 85280
602-359-4357 (phone & fax)

EDitor@ripoffreport.com EDitor@ripoffreport.com

 

1.   Re: Ed Magedson Served Personally - Scam.com

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RE: CIC 04-21090 Magedson, ED (602) 542-5763. Tammy Miller 3. Contact his service providers and sue them. they have a responsibility for ...
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7 Oct 2007 ... Join ed's consumer advocacy program(LOL). 2.Contact Arizona attorney general office. RE: CIC 04-21090 Magedson, ED (602) 542-5763 ...
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