 | |
Type of site | Private, for-profit |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Created by | Ed Magedson |
| URL | www |
| Launched | December 8, 1998 |
| Current status | Online |
Ripoff Report is a privately owned and operated for-profit website founded by Ed Magedson. [1] The Ripoff Report has been online since December 1998 and is operated by Xcentric Ventures, LLC which is based in Tempe, Arizona. [2] In 2023 an Australian judge found the company purports to be a consumer review site but profits from extortive business practices. [3]
Ripoff Report allows users over the age of 14 [4] to complain anonymously about any firm or person. [5] The site requires creating an account before "reports" can be submitted [4] but it does not verify the identity of users. Ripoff Report results may show up on Google searches for the people (or firms) mentioned in the report, which can be potentially embarrassing or damaging for them. Reports are not automatically added to the website: they must be approved first. According to the site's Terms of Service, users are required to affirm that their reports are truthful and accurate, but the site says that it neither investigates, confirms nor corroborates the accuracy of submissions.
Companies or individuals who have been named in a report may respond with a rebuttal at the bottom of the same webpage, which explains their side of the story, if the rebuttal is approved by Ripoff Report. There is no charge to submit a rebuttal, but they must have a registered account. Alternatively, to "repair the reputation" [1] because of something that is written in the website, Ripoff Report asks them to pay for investigations of complaints and responses [5] carried out by "Ripoff Report's pool of Arbitrators", [6] and to edit the webpage. [7] According to Bloomberg Businessweek, this mechanism is an example of "how to make money rebuilding reputations: have them destroyed first", which is why a federal court stated that victims have "probable cause to sue for extortion and racketeering". [8] [9] As of 2021, Google Search started to consider this practice deceptive and to downrank Ripoff Report's webpages. [10]
Ripoff Report sells ad space on its website [1] [7] and offers companies the option to pay for complaint investigations, which can cost from US$5,500 to over $100,000. [5] It also offers an arbitration program. [11]
The site says that, with the exception of cases that are decided against the complainant in arbitration, all complaints remain public and unedited [12] and authors are not allowed to remove their own reports even in cases where a mistake has been made. [13]
In May 2013, Ripoff Report started a new service called "Ripoff Report Verified" that offers companies with no prior complaints an option to become "Verified". According to an interview with Search Engine Watch, for $89 per month, "Once a verified business gets any negative complaints, they would be alerted via email about the negative reviews and will be able to discuss a resolution with the person that left the negative reviews." [14] [15]
Ripoff Report's legal page claims that "you can't sue Ripoff Report just because we provide a forum for speech" and that "Ripoff Report has had a long history of winning these types of cases. This is because of a federal law called the Communications Decency Act or CDA, 47 U.S.C. § 230." [16] On the contrary, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit stated that "the Communications Decency Act does not immunize Xcentric for the content it creates and posts" and "does not immunize misrepresentations made by a publisher about its publishing conduct." [9]
By creating an account, a user agrees to exclusive venue in Arizona for any legal dispute arising from his or her posting. In June 2013, a federal court in Maryland found that this agreement did not prevent a user from suing both the author of a report and Ripoff Report in Maryland, because the user agreement applied only to the rebuttal, not to the report. [17]
In the Blockowicz v. Williams case, 675 F.Supp.2d 912 (N.D.Ill. 2009), a federal district court in Chicago found that Ripoff Report was not required to comply with an injunction to remove reports because it had not been named a defendant in the original lawsuit. [18]
Two Australians sued Google over their failure to remove links to defamatory content on Ripoff Report. In February 2011 Dr Janice Duffy filed defamation proceedings in South Australia. [19] In 2015, Duffy prevailed in her defamation case against Google for serving libelous comments, originating from Ripoff Report, and allowing its auto-complete function to assist users in finding the content. As of October 27, 2015, unresolved issues in the case are "...the defences of triviality and time limitation, the application for an extension of time, and causation and quantum of damages."> [20] Duffy sued again a year later over search results that appeared on the website between October 2015 and October 2016. Justice Tilmouth found in his judgement that search results on google.com.au were defamatory, and that Google was "proven to have participated in the communication" of the results "so as to render it liable as a secondary publisher". [21]
In February 2013, Jarrod Sierocki filed defamation proceedings in Queensland. [22] Sierocki won $287,788.00 in damages and interest against a former partner and client who were forced to admit that they had defamed SIerocki on Ripoff Report's un-redactable forum. A related case against Google appears to be working its way through the Australian courts as of April 23, 2015. [23]
In website pages of Public Citizen, it was noted that Ripoff Report has received some criticism of its "Corporate Advocacy, Business Remediation & Customer Satisfaction Program," [24] particularly whether Ripoff Report sufficiently discloses all facts that would influence the public's perception of the program. [25]
In July 2013 the Government of India ordered a block on accessing the site. The block was removed the next month. [26]
In May 2014 the Australian search engine Yahoo!7 blocked the Ripoff Report after multiple defamation complaints. [27] It was unblocked after about a week. [28]
Ripoff Report's publisher, Xcentric Ventures, LLC, unsuccessfully sued consumers and their attorneys for malicious prosecution in federal district court in Phoenix, Arizona in 2011. In August 2015, the United States 9th Circuit Court of Appeals published their order affirming the district court's order dismissing the case. The ruling notes that Xcentric had sued over the consumers' underlying attempted racketeering extortion claim, which "alleged that Xcentric attempted to extort money by encouraging third parties to post negative reviews, manipulating the posts to highlight negative reviews and to further highlight the negative reviews if the businesses posted rebuttals, and then charging high fees to 'turn the negative into a positive.' […] The claim was tenable because a district court had previously held that similar allegations stated an extortion claim against Xcentric," the 9th Circuit wrote in its order. [29] [9]
In 2015, the United States District Court for the District of Utah stated that, although the Ripoff Report homepage shows the tag lines "By Consumers, for consumers" and "Don't let them get away with it. Let the truth be known", the site allows competitors, and not just consumers, to post comments. The Ripoff Report home page also says: "Complaints Reviews Scams Lawsuits Frauds Reported, File your review. Consumers educating consumers", which allows a reasonable inference that the Ripoff Report encourages negative content. Moreover, Ripoff Report's webmaster affirmed that positive posts about a company are not allowed in the website. Therefore, the court concluded that the website's owner is not a neutral publisher, because, through large fees that companies must pay for the website's advocacy programs, it has an interest in, and encourages, negative content. [30] [31]
The now-defunct Defamation Action League (aka Internet Defamation League) was started in January 2007 by William Stanley [32] to force the shutdown of Ripoff Report and duplicates ripoffreports.com (a typosquatted clone, with an "s" at the end) and badbusinessbureau.com (also run by Ed Magedson). The Defamation Action League claimed to be dedicated to fighting online defamation. The Defamation Action League's strategy involved "protesting" the companies which hosted Ripoff Report and badbusinessbureau.com by setting up "protest sites" and engaging in annoyance strategies such as placing classified ads with the companies' telephone numbers for products they aren't selling or sending mass emails to other customers. In return Magedson filed a lawsuit under RICO. June 21, 2007 preliminary injunction was granted against DefamationAction.com and ComplaintRemover.com. Stanley and cohorts were found liable for defamation and making death threats. [32] [33]
In March 2017, the Italian Data Protection Authority affirmed that Ripoff Report's activities — namely, Ed Magedson's requests for money to edit web pages — are illegal in Italy. [34] The Italian authorities also noticed that Ripoff Report's web servers are occasionally not reachable from Italy in order to evade controls by the authorities themselves. [34] Besides, they noticed that some web pages — which were being investigated by the authorities — were deleted out of the blue by the website owner, despite the claim that Ripoff Report does not remove reports. [34]
Defamation, at a first approximation, is any form of communication that can injure a third party's reputation. This can include all modes of human-understandable communications: gestures, images, signs, words. It is not necessarily restricted to making assertions that are falsifiable, and can extend to concepts that are more abstract than reputation – like dignity and honour. For a communication to be considered defamatory, it must be conveyed to someone other than the defamed. Depending on the permanence or transience of the communication medium, defamation may be distinguished between libel and slander. It is treated as a civil wrong, as a criminal offence, or both. The exact definition of defamation and related acts, as well as the ways they are dealt with, can vary greatly between countries and jurisdictions; for example, whether they constitute crimes or not, to what extent insults and opinions are included in addition to allegations of facts, to what extent proving the alleged facts is a valid defence.
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution's freedom of speech protections limit the ability of American public officials to sue for defamation. The decision held that if a plaintiff in a defamation lawsuit is a public official or candidate for public office, not only must they prove the normal elements of defamation—publication of a false defamatory statement to a third party—they must also prove that the statement was made with "actual malice", meaning the defendant either knew the statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether it might be false. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan is frequently ranked as one of the greatest Supreme Court decisions of the modern era.
Reputation management, originally a public relations term, refers to the influencing, controlling, enhancing, or concealing of an individual's or group's reputation. The growth of the internet and social media led to growth of reputation management companies, with search results as a core part of a client's reputation. Online reputation management, sometimes abbreviated as ORM, focuses on the management of product and service search engine results.
Barrett v. Rosenthal, 40 Cal.4th 33 (2006), was a California Supreme Court case concerning online defamation. The case resolved a defamation claim brought by Stephen Barrett, Terry Polevoy, and attorney Christopher Grell against Ilena Rosenthal and several others. Barrett and others alleged that the defendants had republished libelous information about them on the internet. In a unanimous decision, the court held that Rosenthal was a "user of interactive computer services" and therefore immune from liability under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Yelp Inc. is an American company that develops the Yelp.com website and the Yelp mobile app, which publishes crowd-sourced reviews about businesses. It also operates Yelp Guest Manager, a table reservation service. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Intelius, Inc. is a public records business headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It provides information services, including people and property search, background checks and reverse phone lookup. Users also have the ability to perform reverse address lookups to find people using Intelius’ services and an address. Intelius, founded by former InfoSpace executives, was started in 2003.
The origins of the United States' defamation laws pre-date the American Revolution; one influential case in 1734 involved John Peter Zenger and established precedent that "The Truth" is an absolute defense against charges of libel. Though the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect freedom of the press, for most of the history of the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court failed to use it to rule on libel cases. This left libel laws, based upon the traditional "Common Law" of defamation inherited from the English legal system, mixed across the states. The 1964 case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, however, radically changed the nature of libel law in the United States by establishing that public officials could win a suit for libel only when they could prove the media outlet in question knew either that the information was wholly and patently false or that it was published "with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not". Later Supreme Court cases barred strict liability for libel and forbade libel claims for statements that are so ridiculous as to be obviously facetious. Recent cases have added precedent on defamation law and the Internet.
Reputation is a business-to-business online reputation management and customer experience management company headquartered in San Ramon, California. The company claims its software-as-a-service platform helps businesses monitor and respond to online reviews, social media, and surveys; analyze customer sentiment; and collaborate to make operational improvements.
Cambridge Who's Who, also known as Worldwide Who's Who, is a vanity publisher based in Uniondale, New York. It describes itself as highlighting people's professional careers by publishing encapsulated biographies. For additional payment, the publisher also provides other promotional services such as press releases, videos, and Executive of the Year awards. The company is located in Uniondale, New York. As of 2010, Donald Trump Jr. was spokesman and "executive director of global branding" of the company. As of November 2016 the business was "not accredited" by the Better Business Bureau of Metropolitan New York, Long Island, and the Mid-Hudson Region.
The Wikimedia Foundation has been involved in several lawsuits. They have won some and lost several others.
The Defamation Act 2013 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, which reformed English defamation law on issues of the right to freedom of expression and the protection of reputation. It also comprised a response to perceptions that the law as it stood was giving rise to libel tourism and other inappropriate claims.
Brand.com was an American online reputation and brand management company based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded as Reputation Changer in 2009. In 2013 it purchased the Brand.com domain name for $500,000, and changed its name. The company provided Internet search management, creating positive web articles about its clients in order to have them overtake negative news, and Wikipedia profile management. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2015 and was shut down.
Palmer v. Kleargear.com, no. 13-cv-00175, is a 2013 federal lawsuit in which an internet retailer was sued by two of its customers after it billed the customers for $3,500 following a negative review. The retailer, Kleargear.com, specializes in nerd apparel, geek toys, gadgets and office toys; it is owned by Paris-based Descoteaux Boutiques. The plaintiffs charged the company with violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act, defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. In March 2014, the district court entered a default judgment for the plaintiffs, and in June 2014 awarded damages of $306,750. As of 2015, the Palmers continue to attempt to collect the judgment.
The right to be forgotten (RTBF) is the right to have private information about a person be removed from Internet searches and other directories under some circumstances. The concept has been discussed and put into practice in several jurisdictions, including Argentina, the European Union (EU), and the Philippines. The issue has arisen from desires of individuals to "determine the development of their life in an autonomous way, without being perpetually or periodically stigmatized as a consequence of a specific action performed in the past".
Google has been involved in multiple lawsuits over issues such as privacy, advertising, intellectual property and various Google services such as Google Books and YouTube. The company's legal department expanded from one to nearly 100 lawyers in the first five years of business, and by 2014 had grown to around 400 lawyers. Google's Chief Legal Officer is Senior Vice President of Corporate Development David Drummond.
O'Kroley v. Fastcase, Inc.,, aff'd, No. 15-6336, is a U.S. court case concerning defamation in online search results. The plaintiff, Colin O'Kroley, alleged that Google's automated snippet algorithm created a defamatory search result by falsely implying that the plaintiff had been accused of indecency with a child. The District Court granted Google's motion to dismiss the case, and found that Google had immunity from the defamation charges under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects interactive computer services from being held liable as a speaker or publisher for information provided by a third-party information content provider. On appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed the District Court's decision.
In May 2013, the German Federal Court of Justice stated that Google's predictions within the autocomplete function of its web search engine can violate the right of personality. The right of personality ensures that a person's personality (reputation) is respected and can be freely developed. Only the individual shall, in principle, decide how he/she wants to present himself/herself to third parties and the public.
Hassell v. Bird was a case heard within the California court system related to a court-ordered removal of a defamatory user review of a law firm from the Yelp website. The case, first heard in the California Court of Appeals, First District, Division Four, unanimously ruled in favor of the law firm, ordering Yelp to remove the review in 2016. Yelp refused to remove the review and appealed the decision. In July 2018, the California Supreme Court reversed the order in a closely divided 4-3 decision, stating that Yelp's position fell within Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as a publisher of user material, and was not required to comply with the trial court's removal order. However, the part of the trial court's decision that ordered the reviewer to remove the defamatory review and pay a monetary judgement were left intact. The Supreme Court of the United States denied to hear the appeal, leaving the California Supreme Court's decision.
Rector v. Major League Baseball Advanced Media, No. 303630, was a New York Supreme Court defamation case. Andrew Rector sued Major League Baseball, the New York Yankees, ESPN and their MLB announcers for broadcasting images of him sleeping at a game at Yankee Stadium between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox and allegedly making defamatory comments about him. Rector sued for $10 million for "defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress". The case was dismissed by Judge Julia Rodriguez, who ruled that the statements made were not defamatory.
Barilaro v Shanks-Markovina & Google was a defamation court case before the Federal Court of Australia in 2021 and 2022. The case revolved around claims that two videos published on the friendlyjordies YouTube channel brought the then Deputy Premier of New South Wales, John Barilaro, into public disrepute, odium, ridicule and contempt. Barilaro resigned his seat of Monaro citing this case being ongoing as a reason, causing a by-election in that seat. Barilaro originally filed the lawsuit against the first respondent, Jordan Shanks-Markovina, as the videos' author, and the second respondent, Google, as their publisher via its YouTube service. The case against Shanks-Markovina was settled in November 2021 with Shanks-Markovina apologising in court for allegedly offensive remarks made in the videos. The case against Google began on 21 March 2022, and concluded on the 24th. The judge found in favour of Barilaro on 6 June.
Asked about a comment alleging another woman had herpes, Magedson responds: "This f—— broad probably did something." He laughs when told about the downturn at Sarah Van Assche Interiors. If so much money was at stake, Magedson says, she should have sued her accuser for slander or paid Ripoff Report its $2,000 fee to conduct an arbitration.
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{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)He [Justice Malcolm Blue] ruled that Google did publish defamatory material about Dr Duffy and ordered the case proceed to trial on the remaining unresolved issues.
The payout was four times as large as the previous highest amount awarded by a supreme court judge.
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