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Comment by jdmichal | Hacker News Reader

I know there's a few lawyers here. Assuming that these lawsuits were filed against non-existent defendants, and that the agreements from these "defendants" were actually written and submitted by the plaintiff -- What's the realistic punishment here? Would these false documents be sworn statements, and if so, would that put perjury on the table?

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Disbarment for any lawyers. For pro se, they can, for example, ban them from filing lawsuits unless they meet certain conditions (like independent verification, etc).

All of this plus fraud (if they misrepresented what they would do) and criminal charges (because pretty much everything ever is against the law)

All of which makes me wonder why these SEO/"reputation management" companies even bother with this, given all the risks. Are they seriously hoping that this won't be discovered or that they won't be punished?

Some people lack the ability to accurately assess the risks of their own actions, for a variety of reasons. Personality disorders, arrogance, institutional pressure, a long history of getting away with said risky behavior, can all cloud or utterly shatter the ability of someone to appreciate where the road they're on is most likely to lead.

In this case I'd suggest the reason is 'money', not some mental issue.

Sure, greed is a factor, but most people are greedy, while still managing to appreciate the risks of being caught.

They may completely appreciate the risks, however, and simply have judged it unlikely they would be caught.

I mean... isn't that the primary risk?

I'm sure they thought they would get away with it since there isn't a real "victim" other than someone who may or may not remember leaving a negative review or comment and probably won't even notice it's gone missing. Honestly I'm impressed that anyone connected all the dots so quickly.

> I'm impressed that anyone connected all the dots so quickly

Or it happens so often that this is the 1 in 1000 that got discovered.

Lost traffic on websites = lost revenue.

Your mistake is assuming behavior like this is rare. If a law firm has connections in the state bar, there is no force that will punish them besides media outlets. Even then, the law firm (or reputation management company) can sit through the storm until public interest fades. I think required electronic document filing with computers analyzing the cases is the best way to solve the widespread problem of lack of legal accountability.

This depends on the state. There are states where "people helping clients commit fraud" gets you a suspension (new york).

There are states that take it more seriously, like maryland. http://www.marylandinjurylawyerblog.com/2009/01/a_tale_of_tw...

(This is pretty extreme, but maryland does take bar complaints very seriously)

Any lawyer or law firm who intentionally presented fabricated documents with forged signatures to a court under these circumstances would almost certainly be disbarred. Reputation management firms don't face that risk -- but they are subject to punishment in other ways.

The article makes it sound like almost all of this is due to Richart Ruddie. In which case, the answer to your question is, they aren't. One person is, and now they've been found out.

I've met quite a few SEO folks that have exactly this mindset. They just hop from one short-sighted arbitrage opportunity to another.

> All of which makes me wonder why these SEO/"reputation management" companies even bother with this, given all the risks.

The companies all seem to be fronts for the same individual. Its not unheard of for one individual or a small group to come up with a moneymaking scam that involves exploiting the legal system when they believe that they have constructed enough cutouts (e.g., separate front companies) to protect themselves from liability (and maybe even identification.)

Consider, e.g., the case of Prenda Law. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law

It's super hard to discover this. It's not like courts require anything real real. Even service of process is basically "affidavit i served a guy".

Since they are apparently doing it in states where they have guaranteed the person does not exist, who is going to argue?

Courts are pretty much the last people who ever would discover this. They entirely rely on their raw power to punish people to prospectively enforce decorum and rule, not investigation or auditing.

That is, they do not discover fraud easily or quickly, but when they discover fraud, it tends to go very much "not well" for the people involved.

> Since they are apparently doing it in states where they have guaranteed the person does not exist, who is going to argue?

That's interesting. This may be a case where you are more secure if your name is common, such as John Smith, since I think the likelihood of finding a state without a John Smith in residence is fairly small.

OTOH demonstrating that none of the John Smiths in the state are the one named in the paperwork might be more difficult.

If more than one person was involved, and the documents were electronically filed, RICO might be on the table: http://legalnewsline.com/stories/510989090-second-circuit-ru....

Kinda looks like this guy, who appears to responsible for at least a decent portion of the examples in the WaPo story, is a run of the mill scammer who has already been caught:

http://structuredsettlements.typepad.com/structured_settleme...

This is his LinkedIn profile. Another proud Stanford grad. https://www.linkedin.com/in/richartruddiestanford

His linkedin claims he took 1 Stanford class, and the notes he claims he wrote were clearly written by someone else (it's on Sukru Burc Eryilmaz's personal page).

He went to Florida Atlantic University for his Bachelor's degree. He gets a nice headline in his education as Stanford, but he definitely did not attend for any degree.

So he is... being creative with his education profile. Given what he is involved in now, that seems on par.

Perjury would be on the table. Fraud, too, maybe, against the actual owner of the content. At a minimum any lawyer involved would probably face disbarment for fraud upon the court; the fact that they're all pro se cases makes me suspicious that a lawyer might have been involved in drafting some boilerplate language but not involved in the actual litigation, but it'd be difficult to argue that, eg, the reputation management firm's general counsel didn't know what was going on.

In addition to the other theories, this seems to be the rare, submissible case of tortious abuse of process. With wide-open punitive damages, I would think.

Prenda Law took >6 years and nobody is in prison, what makes you think this will be any different?

> Prenda Law took >6 years and nobody is in prison, what makes you think this will be any different?

Well, for one thing, Prenda Law controlled the entities (or they were completely fictional) that were the plaintiffs in its cases, whereas the "reputation management firms" here are apparently filing cases with their reputation management clients as named plaintiffs which the clients apparently don't know about and don't approve, and object to once they are actually made aware of them. And they use the results to influence third parties besides the defendants, and the defendants aren't generally doing something that they want to hide from attention.

From the appearance of what is going on here, there are lots of reasons to think that this scam could blow up much faster on its perpetrators than Prenda Law measured from the first time someone noticed something funny going on.

> the "reputation management firms" here are apparently filing cases with their reputation management clients as named plaintiffs which the clients apparently don't know about and don't approve, and object to once they are actually made aware of them

That's quite a leap from "don't want to take the fall".

You're reading a lot more into my question than what I wrote. I don't expect anything -- I honestly wanted to know what the perpetrators of the given actions I listed would be facing as potential charges.

That being said, it looks like a good portion of the Prenda Law charges would probably also apply.

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