Pissed Consumer Exposes New York Luxury Car Dealer's Use Of Bogus Notarized Letters To Remove Critical Reviews

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the brand-management-yo dept

Thu, Feb 28th 2019 3:37am — Tim Cushing

Pissed Consumer has uncovered more fraudulent behavior by companies hoping to scrub critical reviews from its site. The site first uncovered the use of bogus court orders to delist content -- something Eugene Volokh and Paul Levy have turned into a small-time crusade. These fraudulent court documents resulted in some genuine legal action. Questionable reputation management firms are now facing lawsuits from Pissed Consumer and the attorney general of Texas.

The latest twist in reputation management also includes forged legal documents. The stakes are a bit lower because no one's directly defrauding a court or forging a judge's signature. But the underlying tactic is still comparable: the misuse of fake legal documents to remove criticism from the internet.

Every once in a while, people would post a review or a comment here and there about Luxsport Motor Group. From time to time we received notarized letters from the posters who wanted to remove their reviews posted by mistake. Nothing suspicious. Until fraud was discovered.

Fraud involving notarized letters is the subject of this article.

[...]

As stated above, we accepted several notarized letters from the authors of the reviews about Luxsport Motor Group. They looked legitimate at a first glance as they were handled separately at different times and by different managers of our company.

In order to remove a review, the reviewer has to send a notarized letter retracting the review -- one containing a sworn statement the review was inaccurate when it was posted. This helps prevent companies from impersonating users in order to remove their criticism.

By spacing out these bogus letters, Luxsport went undetected for awhile, slowly cleaning up its review history at Pissed Consumer. But things changed last March. Another notarized letter arrived but was missing some of the required statements. Pissed Consumer spoke to the person who had written the review they now wanted removed… only to find out this person hadn't sent a notarized letter.

This happened again in October. Another review was removed with a notarized letter. Shortly thereafter, Pissed Consumer was contacted by the reviewer wondering why their review had been removed. The site dug into the stack of notarized letters it had received targeting negative reviews of Luxsport and discovered a whole mess of suspicious oddities:

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