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Jeweler Forged Judge's Signature To Force Google To Kill Negative Reviews (thedailybeast.com)
A sapphire salesman is facing jail time for forging a judge's signature in a case involving Google. Kelly Weill from The Daily Beast reports: Michael Arnstein is the third-generation owner of the Natural Sapphire Company, a Manhattan-based jewelry business. After a falling-out with a former business partner, Arnstein's company amassed dozens of negative reviews, which featured prominently in the Natural Sapphire Company's Google search results. Arnstein sued the former business partner in 2011, accusing him of writing defamatory negative reviews, and a judge ordered the partner to delete 54 of the negative comments. But some negative reviews remained, even after the court order. So Arnstein copied the judge's signature and forged new court orders of his own, demanding that Google scrub negative reviews from his company's search results, Arnstein admitted in a guilty plea on Friday.
Forging the signature of a judge to circumvent the checks and balances of the legal system. What a simple idea. There's absolutely no way that that could go wrong - after all, court orders aren't logged in a central system; the recipient of the order can't check back with the court to verify it; and it couldn't possibly come back upon the forger.
Right? Right?
This is a case of SEO reputation management taken to an illegal level.
That works?
When a company has a bad reputation, and customers avoid it, it has negative brand equity, and the brand is worth less than nothing. The simple and obvious solution is to change the name of the business, or start a new business and transfer the assets. This would have likely been far cheaper than paying legal expenses and then slowly rebuilding the brand upward from Death Valley.
Why didn't he just threaten to withhold advertising revenue?
I hope he was sure it was worth the risk because to me this seems like a dumb reason to risk jail time and really bad PR.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The guy did something illegal and is now going to jail. To my mind, the system worked as it’s supposed to in this case.
#DeleteChrome
I expected much more from the Irish gem dealer community. Weren't their criminals a lot smarter in the past?
Yes, bad reviews are terrible for a business, and often unfair. Lawsuits are usually the wrong way to respond to those, and positive reviews from satisfied customers are usually a great way to respond to those--but lawsuits are an option if someone keeps making illegitimate complaints and it hurts your business enough, or if someone is using them to harass your employees, for example.
You know what's not an option?
Forging court orders.
Real lawyers write in C++
This story wrecks the stereotype that 'red sea pedestrians' are smart.
... at least get something that is worth the risk. Scrubbing negative review from google search? Dumb people be, dumb people do.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Betterige says...
#DeleteChrome
he pretty much got screwed twice , his lawyer should had asked for google history to be scrubbed cleaned//
There's a trick the reputation companies do (basically fraud).
1. AC writes a bad review of a company X.
2. X files a defamation case against AC
3. A person comes forward admitting they are the AC, and agrees their comment is defamation
4. The person coming forward is a fraudster working for a reputation management company, not the real AC.
5. X goes to court with AC's testimony, confirming it is defamation and demands internet company takes down comment.
Judges are wising up to this particular trick, but I'm sure the companies have lots of these games up their sleeves that we don't yet know about.
That's why those of us in lapidary circles on FB and other places tend to get our rubies and sapphires from people that do the mining themselves. Well, I mine my own, since you can find ruby and sapphire in California.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
One that indexes the internet without censorship
What if someone attempted to kill you? An absolutely premeditated attack. The person aims their gun at you, pulled the trigger, but the gun did not work. No harm here, so no punishment is warranted by your logic.
Punishment is overrated. It should be used ti correct bad behavior, not mitigate harm.
(((Michael Arnstein))) (((Jeweler))) Why does this stereotype write itself?
Some races criminals are prodominantly petty crime while others are white collar crime. A few have an even mix of both.
Any "race" can have criminals.
As for the stereotype you are whining about, you need to go and study some european history to see why it is traditional for people of the Jewish persuasion to be working in the jewelry and financial sectors. At one time that was the only careers they were allowed to have.
Hint - its another dumbass thing in the holy babble about who is allowed to make loans to who.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I dunno. If a presidential candidate and his sons attempted treason and collusion with an enemy of state, and if I were a prosecutor, I would file treason and espionage charges even if they failed, for example, if someone were to try to leverage money laundering and real estate deals to get dirt on an opponent and ended up in the White House. I would absolutely file those charges and push for the maximum sentence allowed by the constitution, because the intent was clear, in this purely hypothetical case, that they tried to sell an entire nation out to the enemy for personal gain.
Sometimes an attempted crime is every bit as bad as one which was successful, and should be punished just as harshly to deter others from attempting the same.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
But what if said President were very rich and very corrupt and would get your kids into the best schools if you dropped the whole thing?
We have seen the enemy and it is us. - Pogo