One can’t help but notice that on many of the blogs, comments and posts that appear online pertaining to Ed Magedson, the oft-maligned founder of the consumer complaints website Ripoff Report, statements are made (often vehemently) that Ed is a “wanted man” or “under Federal indictment.”

Based on the repetitive wording of the claims the writers seem to be repeating things that they must have read elsewhere online. Proof of these claims, or even links to pertinent court records seem elusive. Personally I found that the assertions lacked credibility – in that the FBI would have little difficulty locating almost anyone (unless they be a Whitey Bulger.)

So it was illuminating to read that in a recent Arizona Court of Appeals decision on a count of defamation against Ed, the court wrote that the purported originator of these allegations had in fact stated in an earlier deposition that they were not true.

“Magedson supports his argument for actual malice with Brewington’s admission in a deposition that he knew Magedson was not wanted by the F.B.I. and he knew Magedson was not a criminal on the run”

Quoted from ¶41 found on page nineteen of the Memorandum Decision found here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/76608180/Xcentric-Ventures-v-John-F-Brewington-Arizona-Court-of-Appeals-Opinion

Whilst I am in no position to offer anyone legal advice, it would seem wise for those who have been repeating and re-broadcasting these claims to review the court document with a view to revising their position.

Remember folks “Of course it must be true. I read it on the Internet. In LOTS of places.” is not a very effective affirmative defense.

You may not be aware that larger size versions of LinkedIn profile pictures are available – that’s only if the owner had originally uploaded a higher resolution version. LinkedIn automatically resizes the uploaded pictures to a uniform “thumbnail” size of 60 pixels x 60 pixels, but the original is also made available for anyone to view.

Here’s how to view yours or anyone’s:

1. Hover over the profile picture.
2. A “magnifier” tool image appears in the bottom right of pic.
3. Click on the “plus” in the magnifier and the full-size picture will appear in a pop-up window.

If there is no larger picture available the tool does not appear.

Privacy tip: Resize your picture before uploading. 200 or 250 pixels maximum is big enough for a contact or potential contact to know it’s really you.

Someone has created a Google Plus Page for Bank of America, trashing the nation’s largest bank with a series of mocking photos, images and other posts,

Full Story: Bank of America’s Google Plus Page Appears ‘Brandjacked’

The Google + page is still visible here.

So, can just anyone setup a Google+ page for another business? For your business? The answer is yes. There is no checking done for permission!

Google’s response to this situation, according to the article, is : the company doesn’t comment on individual Plus pages, “we also rely on the community (as with a lot of our other products like Android Market and YouTube) to help report profiles they feel are violating our policies. You can see a ‘Report this Profile’ link on the left hand side of the page.”

My take: Social media. Sometimes a friend. Sometimes a foe. Always needs monitoring.

It seems I was a day late and a dollar Turkish lira short when I posted earlier that Ripoff Report might have concerns about the ability of a Cypriot court to reach across the Mediterranean and serve a judgement on Ripoff Report’s Turkey-based webhosting provider.

In fact on or about October 6, the ripoffreport.com website and (I assume) its all-important database of complaints, rebuttals and user accounts was quietly moved back to the United States. The website now resides on the Amazon EC2 hosting infrastructure, sharing servers with Distil, a young company who offer “website scraping protection services, ” along with a variety of filtering and anti-bot features for website operators.

At face-value Distil shares some similarities with the Cloudflare service, but with many extra features geared to the protection of content. Cloudflare is more focused on availability, performance and denial-of-service protection. (The LulzSec hackers enjoyed and fully utilized protection of Cloudflare earlier this year, defying umpteen attempts to locate or bring down the LulzSec servers.)

However, like Cloudflare, Distil may act only as a “front end” to a website, leaving the true location and real IP address hidden both to the outside world and inquisitive persons such as this writer.  It is therefore possible that the Ripoff Report website and database are still located in Turkey with public access being filtered through the Distil service hosted on Amazon in the US. The move may have been planned in advance and the timing of the switchover a coincidence, rather than being a reaction to the FBME lawsuit.

An amusing footnote is that both Xcentric Ventures (Ripoff Report) counsel David Gingras and FBME bank outside counsel Thanasis Korfiotis have misspelled the name of the other party (FMBE Bank and Xcentric Ventrures respectively.)

More on this Greco-Ottoman-Sonoran-flavored story as new information becomes available….

Cyprus-based FBME Bank Ltd. has filed a lawsuit in Cyprus in an attempt to compel Xcentric Ventures LLC, the owners of Ripoff Report (ripoffreport.com) to take down an anonymous consumer complaint. FBME claims the complaint is false, defamatory, outrageous, damaging  etc. etc.

Where the twist may lie in this Mediterranean saga is that the company that hosts the Ripoff Report website has also been named in the suit. The webhosting company and servers are located in Turkey, an unusual location for a US based website. Possibly one chosen by Arizona based Xcentric not purely for technical reasons, rather for it being out of reach of US courts and verdicts.

I am not familiar with Cypriot or Turkish law, but am aware of the close ties between at least half of Cyprus and Turkey. If FBME prevails in the Cyprus courts, it may just be possible that the webhost will be ordered to remove or redact the post on ripoffreport.com, or face time in a Turkish prison! (I’m recalling the 70′s movie “Midnight Express” whilst I write this.)

In actuality I would surmise that the webhost has little or no ability, or the authority, to edit any of the content of the website, throwing the ball back to Arizona for a decision as to how to proceed. I also surmise that Ripoff Report will not want to jeopardize the entire website and their “mutually beneficial” working arrangement over a single post, and may redact or even (gasp!) remove the post.

In a tongue-in-cheek comment on the document hosting service scribd.com, Xcentric Ventures General Counsel David Gingras quipped “It’s all Greek to me?” [sic] when he tried to read the complaint, as seen below. For the curious a link to the original offending post is included in the complaint.

FBME Bank Ltd v. Xcentric Ventures, LLC – Complaint?

[Edit: embedded document removed due to excessive tracking code employed by scribd.com. Please click the link above to view the complaint]

In an excellent piece entitled What journalists need to know about libelous tweets at journalism website Poynter.org, the author cites a legal expert who warns that tweets and other twitter postings are not being treated any differently under the law.

“Statements on Twitter can form the basis of a defamation lawsuit just as much as any form of publication,” explained David Ardia, an assistant professor of law at the University of North Carolina. “It’s just sometimes with new technology, it takes a little longer for people to start to take what they read seriously enough — and more importantly for lawyers — to pay enough attention to start to bring lawsuits based on it.”

Two follow-up articles at Mediabistro cite further examples of recent lawsuits and threats of lawsuits involving celebrities and others:

Can Tweets Be Libelous? A Warning To US Journalists

Twitter Defamation Cases Are Heating Up

In some of the cases described the issues are contractual and long-standing. Others are no more than an off-hand insult or a volley in a round of heated back-and-forth.

Human nature being what it is, coupled with the incredibly easy ability for anyone to “publish” using twitter, makes it inevitable that things will get tweeted that are both untrue and intended to harm.

For those who have a reputation or assets to protect, it might be a very good idea to step away from the keyboard, or put down the smartphone for a few minutes, when feeling that raging urge to “teach that ***hole on twitter a lesson.” Once posted a tweet is effectively forever, even if you delete it.

An attractive young lady going by the name of Jenn Collins is in the process of friending hundreds of people on Facebook, many of them members of the UK based business network, Ecademy.  A few days ago she had 488 friends, today 553. Jenn says she lives in Miami Florida and speaks multiple languages. She is also polite, friendly and likes the movies Spiderman and Braveheart.

Unfortunately the pictures, as seen above, are not hers. Nor is Jenn who “she” claims to be. It’s fake and the prelude to a probable scam or other misuse of trust. The person or persons operating the Facebook account are using social engineering to quickly build a pliable and trusting following. The use of provocative pictures has ensured that plenty of men accepted in a flash. No surprise there, just human nature at work.

It’s also the real-world manifestation of the occasional darker side of being “Open Random and Supportive”* (ORS*), a networking methodology frequently advocated on Ecademy and by its founders. So it should come as no surprise that Ecademy Chairman Thomas Power is one of Jenn’s friends!

If I’m wrong about this fine young lady I’ll happily travel to Miami to meet Jenn in person, confirm her identity and report back. Of course, I’ll also retract this blog.

I have a good idea who is behind this, but I’m not saying more at this time, other than to say there is a clue on Facebook that leads to the operator(s).

* Copyright © The Ecademy Ltd. 2009 – 2011

Has your email address or password been exposed in one of the many recent and ongoing website hacks?

Check it quickly and easily at ShouldIChangeMyPassword.com

ShouldIChangeMyPassword.com has been created to help the average person check if their password(s) may have been compromised and need to be changed.

This site uses a number of databases that have been released by hackers to the public. No passwords are stored in the ShouldIChangeMyPassword.com database.

My comment: This website is legitimate and safe. It’s purpose is to help the public. It is not a tool for collecting email addresses. You only enter your email address on the site. They look it up on a list of hundreds of thousands of compromised accounts. You do not enter your password.

If your account does show up you should change your password EVERYWHERE it has been used on the internet.

Swiss Life has just announced the launch of a new insurance product destined to protect the reputation of an individual. Swiss Life E-Reputation has been developed in partnership with Reputation Squad, specialist in reputation management on Internet, and is for now only available to individuals in France. This product provides financial, legal and technical resources to protect anyone in case of violation their reputation on Internet.

Source:
http://www.newsinsurances.co.uk/blog/swiss-life-launch-of-new-e-reputation-product/0169479618

My take: A very interesting development. Maybe a first? Note that they are calculating the average cost for an incident at 2-3 thousand euros.

I’d love to see this type of insurance offered in the USA and elsewhere.

Are you in control of your name online?

Do you even own your name?

Is (at a minimum) the .com domain of your name under your control and correctly registered?

The consequences of not owning your name

The consequences of not owning your name (if your name is uncommon or you are a person of notoriety) can be devastating to reputation, personal well-being and expensive to rectify. What comes as a shock to many is the fact that there is no blanket automatic copyright or right of ownership to one’s own name, according to the international and domestic rules of the domain registration authorities.

Smear campaigns that could have been avoided

Here at Highwick Associates we have been involved in multiple cases where the owners of successful businesses became targets of retribution initiated by the registration of their name (first+last) as a domain name by an adversary. This was followed by the initiation of an online smear campaign anchored by a derogatory website. Because of the significant weight that Google gives to the .com domain extension, these simple websites ranked at or near the top of page one of search engines within a few days.

Removal from search engines is hard

Getting such websites taken down or modified can be very tricky. If they contain “opinion” and are not libelous they are permitted by most web and blog hosting providers. And search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo will not remove anything from search results until the website or content the domain points to is permanently removed from the Internet.

Get expert help before you need to

The advice we give, self-serving though it may appear, is to get expert help to secure your name and brand BEFORE you need to.

Get control first, or lose it

If you don’t get control of your name first, someone else, anyone else, can. And you lose.