A report on Christopher Lawell Inc. and the craigslistsafe.localsafe.org scam was posted today by my friend PhilW over at antifraudintl.org. Thank you, Phil, for posting it, and also thank you for all of your assistance on this project. You've been a great help!
Update on 11/26: This thread has now been deleted.
To whom it may concern:
ReplyDeleteYou have been attacking me for quite some time now based off flawed data. I have stood by idle at the advice of my attorney to ‘allow it to blow over’. Well, it’s apparent that you don’t intend to let that happen so against the advice of my attorney; I am going to address your statements this one time. I will not fuel the fire by entering into a debate. If you are interested in truly finding the scammers/spammers as you have indicated you will cease your campaign against me, if you are more interested in latching onto someone and simply dragging them through the mud, you won’t. Time will tell.
Let me start by saying all the personal information about me is accurate. I do live in Henderson NV. I have never had an interest in hiding on the Internet until you started your attacks, as I have nothing to hide. The things you didn’t address are I am a father, husband, business owner, respected member of the community and I take interest in several local and global charity initiatives. However, what is NOT accurate is the data you have about my involvement in these scams. I will attempt to address all your concerns. I hope it is sufficient to cease your campaigns against me, if it is not there is nothing I can do about it because while you have all MY information, you attack me from the shadows with none of your real information available anywhere.
My income from the Internet is obtained via my web design company 350dollarwebsites.com and my internet marketing efforts in the online gaming vertical. I don’t and have never marketed porn.
The Craigslist article you point to was an early attempt at article marketing 3 YEARS ago. If you will notice in the article, there is reference to an affiliate link that no longer even exists. As I am sure you know, 3 years on the internet is a lifetime. I have not posted on Craigslist more than 1 ad per month (probably longer) in years.
You base the fact that I am involved in this scam because my url “@cli-us.com” was used in registering the hosting account. However, I can start a hosting account right now with your email in it and it doesn’t mean that it is your hosting account. This is the major flaw in your data collection. I will explain to you how I think my information came to be used here.
Over a year ago, I had someone contact me via my web design company 350dollarwebsites.com where we register domains then design and host websites for businesses that may not have a web presence. The person said they would like to register a domain and buy a hosting account. They already were working on a web design so I registered the domain he asked for with my Go Daddy account and set up a hosting account for him. I figured, why not, it’s an easy $20. I was notified at a later date by HostGator (my webhost) that he was violating our terms of service and I promptly canceled his account and refused to refund any money. He hassled me for some time and I blocked him on IM and email and he went away., or so I thought. When the complaint showed up on the broadband reports forum, I wrote multiple letters to the admins of that site explaining the situation and asking that the thread be removed, they ignored every request. They are obviously more concerned about freedom of speech even if it is inaccurate and damaging to innocent people than posting accurate content. I didn’t address this on the forum as I felt most people would want to believe the worst and it would only serve to fuel the fire.
ReplyDeleteIt appears to me that this person who signed up for the domain registration and web-hosting through 350dollarwebsites.com using faked credentials and a stolen or fake PayPal has found a way to get back at me by listing my url as his hosting contact. I have since tried to contact him to address this, but his contact information is all dead. The emails are being returned undeliverable and his IM's are not accepting my messages.
When someone brought to my attention several days ago your current campaign against me, I contacted my attorney and they said to “lock everything down and wait for it to blow over. Addressing these claims will only fuel the fire.” At that time I took down my image from cli-us.com and locked down my linked in account and waited and watched you drag me through a thorough and misplaced campaign of character assassination.
The good news for me in all this is that my friends and family know me well enough to know not to believe what they read on the internet and that I would not be involved in this type of activity. Additionally the business relationships that I have are established and trusted so they will stand by me as well.
To top all this off, I was never contacted directly about any of this until 11-24 when a post was made to my contact page on the Clearline Media company site. It appears that you are more interested in starting your campaign against me than trying to find out from me directly what may have happened. After all, you have ALL my information. You could have even written a letter but never did.
The only thing I am guilty of is being naive 3 years ago and writing about posting on CL as an attempt at article marketing. (A niche which didn’t go very far as evidenced by my career of a total of 3 articles.)
I hope these facts will help you to realize that I am innocent in these attacks by you. If you are interested in exposing the truth, please stop your campaigns/harassment against me. If you are more interested in the joy of harassing people then I understand you will only continue and I will not feed your urges by responding again.
Christopher Lawell