Three Stars Media Launching Defamation Campaign Against Web of Trust?

Web of Trust is another company devoted to cleaning up the internet from various pieces of trash. Volunteers on their forum have been blacklisting Three Stars Inc's various sites as phishing schemes:
http://www.mywot.com/en/forum/3615-monkeyjar-ponzi-phishing
http://www.mywot.com/en/forum/2119-three-stars-orlando?page=1

They've recently had a campaign of defamation launched against them, using various sites to post accusations of selling personal data (pretty much exactly what people are accusing Three Stars of):
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/461/RipOff0461073.htm
http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/web-of-trust-mywotcom-c213015.html
http://hubpages.com/hub/esa_suurio
http://mywotscam.com/mywotblog/
http://my.nowpublic.com/tech-biz/how-safe-mywot-what-esa-suurio-it-scam

WoT made a response to this which can be found here:
http://www.mywot.com/en/blog/157-defamation-campaign-against-web-of-trust

Now, why am I thinking that Three Stars and Difrawi just may be behind this? After all, thousands of scummy sites are blacklisted on WoT, so why would it be them?

Well, first of all, Difrawi has been running similar defamation campaigns in the past, especially against a man named Les Henderson, a well-respected anti-fraud activist who even wrote a book detailing some of his crimes. This campaign never really ended, Henderson's Wikipedia page has been hotly contested ground for years, and many other sites intended to defame him have been created, such as this:
http://www.les-henderson.com/

The WoT detractors put a heavy emphasis on the CEO Esa Suurio personally as being behind the alleged scam, this mirrors the way many critics of Difrawi's operations use his name prominently. One of the people blacklisting Three Stars sites on WoT goes by the username "difrawi_defrawy" for example.

They use sites like NowPublic, TradeVibes and HubPages, these sites have also been used by Three Stars marketing operations.
http://hubpages.com/hub/Three-Stars-Inc
http://www.tradevibes.com/company/profile/three-stars
http://my.nowpublic.com/culture/what-make-buzzgrub-it-good-your-writing-career
Though admittedly there are few sites on the internet that have not been spammed by Three Stars.

So, in order to confirm these suspicions I set up a site with the sole purpose of capturing the IP address of whomever entered it. I sent a link to the site to the email address (mywotcrimes@gmail.com) listed on the defamatory blog mentioned above. The first hit on the site was from 75.112.133.254 - belongs to an ISP "prismone.net". Taking a look at their website we find they are located at 2295 S. Hiawassee Road. Well, that happens to be the same address as Three Stars Media. Somehow, I do not think that is a complete coincidence.

Three Stars Inc Exposed In The Media Again

WFTV just made another investigation of Three Stars Inc and their Career Network:
News article: http://www.wftv.com/news/19970193/detail.html
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RN-MfY9EUE
This nicely confirms many of the complaints that have been made about fake job offers/interviews, and once again they've found a person on the inside with a conscience, very nice work. What I would also have liked to know is if they contacted some of the companies listed on Career Network to see how many actually know they're listed there, beyond the ones that Three Stars provided. They did this before after all.

A quote from the PDF there:

"...all of the jobs posted on the Career Network Web sites are provided by actual employers seeking job applicants for open positions. Career Network does not unilaterally post jobs without an employer's request to do so"

We already know that Career Network has reposted jobs on their sites without permission from any employer, some related sites have openly admitted this. Other bloggers have contacted companies listed on Career Network who turned out to have nothing to do with them.

So you have to wonder what he is actually saying here. Does Kress think that a job post on another job board constitutes a request to repost it anywhere he likes? Personally I'll assume he's just being full of sh*t as usual.

Action 9 claims that Alec Difrawi is running the companies and he's clearly there on camera. The BBB records for Career Network and Three Stars Media have also recently been updated to list him as a contact. This comes as no surprise to anyone who's been watching.

What might however is that Keith Kress has made some very clear assurances in the past that Difrawi had absolutely nothing to do with Three Stars (for proof, please contact me in private). That would seem to be an outright lie, unless he started there recently. Surprising for a lawyer perhaps? No, I guess not.

So they're "working to resolve" BBB complaints. One would think they could have been more careful with this from the beginning considering their previous BBB records. They should be very familiar with those procedures by now.

Funny how they don't seem to see a problem with the way they advertise. If they actually told people more clearly they were just signing up for advertising and that these offers are in no way related to the job application, they might get a lot less complaints from people feeling they were just spammed. People are not being clearly informed of what they are doing, otherwise they would obviously not complain so much. But their business model seems based on this deceit, and probably wouldn't survive without it.

Who wants to bet what they will be calling themselves next month?