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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.
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.