Reply to Christopher Lawell's New Comments

1. I see. Then how did you find out about this blog at all? Messages were sent about all this to cli-us.com and to Ecatel. How did the person who brought this blog to your attention find out about it, if not through those email messages?

2. Wrong. They are calm, analytical, they look at the evidence presented, and all that evidence points to you being guilty. They state that it strongly suggests that you are guilty but that that has not been proven yet. You could have straightened things out but you didn't.

3. Wrong again. Again, you pretend that what was written at broadbandreports.com was some sort of attack on you but it wasn't. Something like this

That's less than two months ago. It uses a model, with hints of sex, as a lure.

There is another site "craigslistsafe.safeandlocal.net" with an almost identical page, registered just one month earlier. The main difference is that it uses a different model as a lure.

They want your credit card information.

Personally, I would not have anything to do with the site. I would be concerned that they might really be in the business of stealing credit information. It is wiser to deal only with businesses that have a well established reputation.

doesn't accuse you of anything. Your name comes up only in the presentation of the registration information. You could have posted a note saying that the site wasn't actually yours and no one would have bothered you about it.

After reading your letter (it is published in the comments to the post on November 23rd) I thought that I should give you the benefit of the doubt. But after looking at your explanations more closely, we see that they do not explain things well at all. They don't agree with the facts, or are inconsistent, or are implausible, or incomplete and avoid the real issues.

1. You say you took down your logo and hid your LinkedIn profile because someone brought to your attention several days ago the campaign against you. The fact is that you hid your personal information on November 17th, at the same time that the scam sites were shut down, which was promptly in response to messages sent to cli-us.com and Ecatel showing that your name had been implicated in all this. There was no campaign against you, as you claim. There was just a post that mentioned you on this blog and some email messages that were sent to ISPs and cli-us.com. I defy you to find any other mention of you being involved with the scam that was made before you hid your personal information. We're supposed to believe that someone you know came across this blog, told you about it, and you just by chance decided to hide your information at the same time that the scam sites were shut down, which was soon after those email messages were sent, and that you did this because of a "campaign" against you that didn't exist? Your claims just don't agree with the facts.
   
   
2. You totally mischaracterize the nature of the discussion of SafeAndLocal.org at Broadbandreports. No one in that discussion was attacking you at all. The thread is brief and the people that took part in it simply talked about whether or not the site was legitimate. More importantly, the story that you give about your involvement with SafeAndLocal.org makes no sense. You write:
   
   ...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.
   
   If you canceled his account when you say you did, then the site would have been dead by the time the thread on Broadbandreports was created; there wouldn't have been any SafeAndLocal.org for people to discuss. Since you were the one who registered the domain, you controlled it and no one else could have used it. If the thread on Broadbandreports was posted after you terminated your client's account, then the only way that SafeAndLocal.org would have been still up and running would have been if you had been operating it. Your explanation here is logically inconsistent. It makes no sense.
   
   If instead you had found out about the TOS violations and had suspended your client's account after the thread was started (which is not what you say), then you could have simply posted a short note in the thread stating that the site was actually run by one of your clients and that you had terminated his account once it was discovered that it was a scam. There was nothing preventing you from doing that. You were afraid that people would attack you for that? That's absurd, just like the idea that you had to have the thread deleted.
   
   
3. Concerning the email address finishlinehosting@cli-us.com, you first try to twist the facts and make this an issue about registration information (which is easy to fake) when it is actually an issue concerning SOA records (which are impossible to fake unless you have access to DNS servers). You say that I base my argument that you were involved in the scam on the fact that a cli-us.com address was used for registering the domains. That is wrong. It was not used for registering the domains and I never said that it was. I know that registration data is easy to fake so I wouldn't jump to any conclusions based upon it. (As a matter of fact, in this case, the registration information for all of the sites involved in the scam was hidden using Whois privacy protection, so it was of no use.) What we're talking about here are the SOA records, which only a DNS server administrator would have access to. They are not data that any old person can specify when registering a domain. They aren't even specified when purchasing a domain but afterwards when the website is actually set up and connected to the Internet.
   
   Second, if someone wanted to get back at you for suspending his account by using a cli-us.com email address for his scam site, then he would have put that address in the registration information, not the SOA record (which he wouldn't have even had had access to unless he had access to the DNS server). The registration information is what you see when you do a whois query. The SOA record, on the other hand, is accessed via a different query and it is usually only looked at by system administrators, the general public has no interest in it. Your explanation about how a cli-us.com email address got used for the SOA records is implausible.
   
   
4. Those articles you wrote show that you have a lot of experience spamming Craigslist. Inundating Craigslist with ads is how the people who run these dating verification scam sites very often work. You dismiss the articles by saying that they just formed a brief attempt at article marketing and you ignore their conent. That content says a lot about the sort of business practices you use. Using multiple IP addresses and email addresses to get around Craigslist's anti-spam safeguards is underhanded and a violation of Craigslist's TOS. Your explanation here is incomplete and avoids the real issues.

Your explanations don't explain things at all. They misstate the facts, ignore the facts, are logically inconsistent, or simply implausible. You keep pushing this idea that you ignored everything and hid your personal information because you didn't want to "fuel the fire", but I've already shown there was no fire to fuel, not on November 17th when you hid your personal information, and not back in January when that thread on Broadbandreports was created. Your name wasn't mentioned on this blog in regards to the scam until November 17th, and it wasn't metioned elsewhere until after you hid your personal information. The truth appears to be that you preferred to hide your personal information and ignore everything until you weren't able to ignore it anymore because certain people found out about it. If you now want to ignore all of the facts presented here once again, go ahead. I don't plan to tell you anything about myself because I know better than to give out my real name when I investigate Internet fraud. Go to aa419.org or antifraudintl.org and tell the people there how unfair it is that they don't reveal their real names when they post about scam sites and suspected scammers. They'd laugh at you. In any case, who I am is irrelevant, all that matters are the facts and the facts don't look good for you.