Sticks and Stones – Who Says Names Can’t Hurt You?

As if click-fraud, credit card fraud, and identity theft weren’t enough for us to worry about, there is a new threat to businesses and individuals today, and it is known as ‘Internet Hostage Taking’ and ‘Cyberspace Attacks’ and its perpetrators are nearly impossible to bring to justice.
These attacks consist of false complaints made against an individual or company on a complaint-related website. (Here is a partial list: ComplaintsBoard.com , RipOffReport.com, Furiocity.com. and many more. These are different from the authorized complaint boards approved by The Ministry for Family and Consumer Affairs.)
These complaints often result in an inaccurate skewing of search results by Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. Then, when a company name is searched, the complaint web page often comes up above or just below the victims’ website on the first search result page. This can cause customers and prospective customers to be less inclined to do business with the victim company because they might believe the false information.
There are really two problems. First, the so-called complaint boards have no policy about who files complaints. Anyone can post anything against anyone and it is never checked out or verified. So, the person being complained about may not even know they have a complaint against them and therefore, have no chance to defend their reputation.
The second challenge is that websites like ComplaintsBoard.com and RipOffReport.com often have policies to not remove the complaints posted on their websites whether they are valid or not.
RipOffReport.com even states the following on their website “As is our policy, we never remove reports even when they are claimed to contain defamatory statements, and even if the original author requests it.” To compound the problem, some complaint websites do not require registration by the person posting the complaint, so there is no way to track fraudulent criticism. The perpetrator can destroy another’s internet reputation with little concern for legal recourse against them. Scary, huh?
My name is Dr. Bunny Vreeland and really this happened to me. I am a board certified clinical hypnotherapist with a Ph. D. in Hypnotherapy. I have been seeing clients for 17 years and have never had a complaint; although, a few times, I did return a client’s money because I didn’t feel I was the right therapist for them.
Here is what happened – In November 2006 I saw a female client for a stress related skin condition over the course of several months. During the five-hypnotherapy sessions the skin problem gradually went away. She insisted on coming back for a 6th session because she told me she had a ‘special request’ she wanted to discuss with me. When she returned in March 2007, she asked me to hypnotize her so that she could ‘forget’ something she planned to do, so that it wouldn’t show up on a lie detector test if she were required to take one! In other words, she was asking me to be an accomplice to a crime!
Needless to say, I refused. At that point, she started screaming and yelling that if I didn’t help her, she would destroy me. I asked her to leave and she finally did, threatening me over and over that, “You will be sorry. You haven’t seen the last of me.”
She called me every day for weeks, screaming, threatening and yelling. I have caller ID and kept the recorded messages, which I later turned over to the police. After a few weeks of her calls, all of a sudden there was nothing. No calls at all. Then, after a few more weeks of silence, she called me to tell me she and her husband were moving out of town and she ‘forgave’ me. I gave a sigh of relief and wished her well, said ‘good-bye’ and hung up.
I was initially unaware of the havoc she would eventually wreak. It wasn’t until May 15 (my birthday) when I ‘Googled’ my website, that I found over a thousand complaints that she had filed!
This is how it was done – she created a number of false internet identities, even being so bold as to use names taken from the numerous positive testimonials on my own website (www.bunnyvreeland.com). Using false e-mail addresses and telephone numbers she began to register complaints on websites like RipOffReport.com and ComplaintsBoard.com, making it appear that many people had suddenly begun to complain about my practice.
On a couple of the complaints, she even posted a false ‘conversation’ between her and ‘me’ with her playing both roles and enacting me as an uncaring and very nasty person. She ‘accused’ me of a litany of unbelievable charges including ‘practicing medicine without a license.’ (I don’t practice medicine. Hypnotherapists never practice medicine.)
She even went so far as to register complaints with the Better Business Bureau where I have had AAA standing for years. Upon examination, the BBB found the complaints were registered using false information. The unfortunate result of this venomous soliloquy was that the false internet complaints rose to the very top of the search results pages, even above my website. What a shock!
When I later mentioned this experience to a realtor friend of mine, he asked if it was the very same person and told me he had the same situation with her! We went to the police and were told that there was nothing they could do. We talked with a total of five attorneys about this and they all said the same thing – we would have to prove the complaints came from her. I have a friend who is a private investigator who went to work on this case, which is still pending.
While the complaint websites and legal entities can offer little assistance in this regard there is help available from a handful of companies specializing in assisting companies to clear their good names. One such company is Kent Campbell (www.kentcampbell.com); an internet marketing company specializing in helping companies improve their tarnished internet reputations.
Wikipedia defines “spamdexing” as “any of various methods to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, usually in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.” Google and other search engines are aware of the problem and are working to fix it, however for most companies the solution is to find an internet marketing specialist with knowledge of the techniques necessary to counter such practices.
While companies like Kent Campbell don’t make the complaints go away, they do make them ‘seem’ to go away. “We help companies counter such threats as ‘spamdexing,’ ‘comment spam,’ and ‘malicious tagging.’
The vast majority of people only view the first or second page of search results,” says President Kent Campbell. “We’ve developed a technique that gently nudges complaints much further down in the search result pages, where most people never look, causing the complaints to effectively ‘disappear.’”
It has been over a year since this happened and her ‘complaints’ remain on the web although they have been ‘pushed down’. I hope nothing like this ever happens to you or anyone you care about.