Message to Christopher Lawell

Chris,

Thank you for contacting me. I read your reply at ChristopherLawell.com and there are a few things about it that bother me.

To begin with, you say that no one ever contacted you about the scam sites. Well, we know that at least two complaints were sent about the scam sites to finishlinehosting@cli-us.com, and that there were many complaints sent to Ecatel prior to those complaints, too. The first known complaint sent to this address was sent on November 14th. The complaints were sent to that address at cli-us.com because that was the only business contact address that was then available. No replies to those complaints were ever received. It was only after a further complaint was made on November 17th, one that mentioned that the site SafeAndLocal.org was registered in your name and that finishlinehosting@cli-us.com was the address for the DNS administrator for the recent scam sites, that the scam sites were promptly taken down.

At the same time, on November 17th, just a few hours after this new complaint was made, you removed your company's logo from your website and hid your LinkedIn profile. There was no campaign against you as you claim, there were just some postings on this blog that mentioned the web pages that linked your name to the scam sites. Read these postings. Do they amount to character assassination? No, they don't. They plainly present facts that strongly pointed to you being involved in the scams. They leave open and acknowledge that it is possible that the scammer was merely a client of yours or someone else entirely. (And, as a matter of fact, before coming across the cli-us.com address, there was another person that we believed was behind the sites.) The fact that you hid your personal information at the same time that the sites got shut down, along with the fact that the sites did not get shut down until it was revealed that your name was linked to them, was very suspicious, you must admit.

I know that you don't care to answer any questions about this, but would you be so good as to answer these?

1) Why were there no replies to the messages sent to finishlinehosting@cli-us.com? Is it not a valid email address? If it isn't, then there should have been an error message sent back from your website. No replies including error messages were ever received, so it must be a valid email address. If it is a valid email address, then what is your relationship with finishlinehosting?

2) As I said, on November 17th, the day that you hid your personal information, the only public postings made on the internet regarding this matter were the ones you see on this blog. They are calm and rational, analytical. You could have easily posted something here regarding the matter. There was no fire for you to fuel. So why didn't you post anything?

3) Likewise, concenring SafeAndLocal.org, you write

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.

However, there was no fire to fuel. There is no complaint in that thread on BroadbandReports.com. The thread was started by someone who wanted some advice. He wasn't sure that SafeAndLocal.org was a legitimate dating site, and he wanted other people's help on figuring that out. There was no hostility or any words at all for that matter that were directed to you or about you. As a matter of fact, the way that your name ended up being mentioned was that someone wanted to point out that the site had only been registered a couple months earlier, and he showed this by posting the registration information in its entirety. The discourse in that thread was calm and reasonable; saying that you didn't just go ahead and post an explanation in it because you didn't want to fuel the fire makes no sense: there was no fire to fuel. You could have easily just posted a note saying that you had registered the site for a client and that you had terminated that client's account; there was nothing for you to be afraid of and there was no reason why you would have needed the thread to have been deleted. So could you explain why you didn't just do that?

I would really like it if you could answer these questions. In your letter you say:

I am going to address your statements this one time. I will not fuel the fire by entering into a debate.

As I've repeatedly said, there is no fire for you to fuel. We can calmly and rationally discuss this matter, so why don't you want do that? I'd really like to find these scammers, and I'm sure that you'd like to see them brought to justice too seeing as they've implicated you in all this. If you give us the information that you have about them, even if it's old, it could help us track them down. So why don't you just talk to us and answer the questions that we have? I am sending an email message to chris@cli-us.com informing you of this post and I hope to hear from you again.

P.S. Christopher Lawell posted several comments on this blog. They all said the same thing, "Please read my full response here: www.christopherlawell.com", so I've deleted all but one of them. That is the only reason I deleted his comments, because they were redundant.