They’d laugh it out of court here too. The problem is that most people don’t have the money to fight it.
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Paper terrorism…
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Hmm. Pol Pot also did some really nasty things, but apparently he was quite a nice guy when you got to know him. Unfortunately, everybody jumped to conclusions, just based on the stuff he did, not who he was.
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…another problem that`s not so pronounced here.
I look forward to collecting your firstborn, along with all the other talented children of parents who are clever enough to get parenting tips from Mark Frauenfelder. If you look at the terms of our contract, you will note in exchange for my valuable copyrighted words, you (along with many great parents with talented children) have extended an “option” or a derivative of your child. It appears I now have a large number of child derivatives of varied value and uses. Fortunately, entrepreneurs also read boing boing, and so if you’re reading this I’d like to extend an unbelievable offer to get in on this now forming child-derivative-exchange, Cocky Cockeyed Corpus Corporation. Send a bitcoin if you want to hear more.
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In theory, then, the owners of every search engine indexer that has ever visited their site is also bound by this sketchy “terms of use.” So are all the people who’ve seen a thumbnail of the page generated by those engines, even if they didn’t consciously choose to visit the site. And are we now all bound by it because we saw an image of the website on that site that reported the story?
I say, let’s just take 'em out back and shove hot dogs into every orifice of their body until they come out the opposite side.
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Yeah, I think this was the juiciest part of the whole story…
But Jen says she was not always so defiant. After receiving the threat she says she was terrified. She contacted Ripoffreport.com to ask that the post be removed but Ripoffreport.com won’t let her without paying $2000 she says.
I guess she could write a complaint about this on RipoffReportReport.com but she’d probably just end up on the hook for even more money.
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Better Business Bureau has action aga them for falsely using the BBB certification logo along with an A+ rating…
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Rumpelstiltskin?
Not from what I’ve seen. Lawyers are still expensive; keep fees/fines/etc below a certain amount and for most people, the cost of fighting them is still far more expensive and risky than giving in.
Also that it’s potentially just not worth fighting. It’s a desk toy company that sent a nonsense bill three years after you didn’t get your stuff. Unless they decide take it any further that’s a classic “good for you, I’m sure I’m going to get right on that” situation.
“In an effort to ensure fair and honest public feedback,” we will fine you if you say bad things about us…wait, what?
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It would be laughed out of court here, too. Which is why the company didn’t take it anywhere near a court, they just made a fraudulent claim against the woman. The problem was with the collection agency and credit reporting bureaus that inexplicably took the claim at its face.
This situation only exists because someone at Kleargear committed extortion and fraud; that isn’t exactly just “screwing up.”
Yeah, I ran across their dispute policy - that would be rage-aneurysm-inducing enough on its own, but collectively the information revealed actually raises the question of whether they were a real company or just a scam that existed purely to rip off potential customers. (The front page is a mass of fake accreditations, for instance.) I wonder if they ever even sold things, or if that was just the front to lure people in to their scam?
I see the CEO has apparently taken down his Linked-In profile in the last day…
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The money was refunded by PayPal but this person decided to go to one of the most insidious websites on the internet to write a negative review. Ripoff Report allows all sorts of slander and misrepresentations to be published by it’s users against businesses and refuses to delete those reviews extorting thousands of dollars from small businesses and even if the writer of the review is successfully sued they STILL won’t delete the review. I can tell you right now that just because someone claims they haven’t received the goods and convinces PayPal to offer a refund does not mean there’s any truth to it, PayPal will often side with the customer, even refunding in the middle of dispute negotiations. I’m not saying this person isn’t being entirely honest but once PayPal refunded why go the next step and attack the business through Ripoff Report? There was no loss, there were no damages and the costs to this business to deal with Ripoff Report are exorbitant.
Ripoff Report seems to sit on some legal line where they can’t be forced to remove slanderous reviews (something which needs to be fixed) and suing the writer seems to be the only way to resolve it. Making it clear in the TOS that this could happen seems reasonable and having learned about this organisation via this story I’ll be strongly considering adding similar terms to my sites. I’m sorry, but this sounds like Karma coming back around to me.
More to the point on the FCRA issue, it is for consumer debt only. This is not, by my reading of case law (though IANAL) a context in which it would be consumer debt. So the recipient of the bill could sue not only under the FCRA but also the FDCPA (Fair Debt Collection Practices Act) for false and misleading information in an attempt to collect a debt.
Getting your money back is the bare minimum, but it is never enough to neutralize a bad customer experience. It is a reason for not suing them and only writing a negative review. Your negative opinion of Ripoff Report might be justified, but as long as the review was factually accurate I don’t see how it matters in this case. A business has to be able to withstand accurate feedback (and realisticallly more than that.)
I know that the net is full of retailers who think that once they refund your money everything should be forgiven and that fixed mistakes no longer warrant negative feedback. I am aware that mistakes happen and that generally retailers aren’t making them out of spite, but mistakes absolutely are what separates bad retailers from a good ones.
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As long as the Ripoff Report posting was complete, and did say that the vendor had made good, noting that a problem had arisen and the experience was not satisfactory is not entirely unreasonable. Posting it in a less inflammatory context might have been more appropriate, but realistically I don’t think you can expect the average consumer to make that kind of distinction; they just post it to the first one (or several) that happen(s) to catch their eye.
On the other other hand, it’s the reader’s responsibility to realize that (a) sites which don’t give the seller a chance to present their perception (or publicly work with the customer to resolve the issue) are suspect at best, and (b) that there’s an inherent reporting bias which will cause many more people to report bad experiences than good ones so even a well-run and reputable site is likely to make problems look more frequent and more serious than is really the case. I consider most such sites the equivalent of Weekly World News – read them if you like worst-case disaster stories, but don’t take them too seriously.
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Add similar terms to your sites, if you want to flush your business down the toilet. Just look at the Internet shitstorm the Kleargear case has stirred up (it’s even made it into local newspaper sites where I am, nowhere near any place relevant to the story), and it seems likely that business, and the life of its owner, is down the tubes.
