Monday, July 27, 2009

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.

12 comments:

  1. Nice job fellow co-author. I should mention, that IP address has also been a very frequent visitor to this blog, visiting a few times just about every weekday. I always assumed it belonged to Three Stars.

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  2. I just found an interesting referral link from Three Stars Inc in my logs:
    "mywotscam.com/mywotblog/wp-admin/edit-comments.php"
    For those who know what that might mean.

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  3. On my blog I also saw that IP on a daily basis (75.112.133.254), I also took it for granted that it belonged to Three Stars. That might even be solid enough to hold up in court that they are behind this.

    I also saw a number of other IPs, all listed with the provider "CellCo Partnership DBA Verizon Wireless". I noted them especially after some of them made comments on the blog defending Three Stars. Those IPs are different pretty much every time I see them.

    They use CellCo for their telemarketing as well, check out these complaints against Career Network:
    http://www.numberinvestigator.com/202591
    The number mentioned there 202-591-2218 belongs to CellCo.

    I'm also told that the person attacking MyWot here also used a CellCo IP:
    http://www.fraudwatchers.org/forums/showthread.php?t=32558

    Anyway, have fun with my IP logs.

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  4. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=50&tagfilter=&title=Special%3AContributions&contribs=user&target=75.112.133.254&namespace=&tagfilter=&year=&month=-1

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  5. Add random vandalisation of Wikipedia to their list of crimes.

    "The greatest player in Flag Football History is Alec Difrawi"

    That's great, if he spent more time with that everyone would be happier.

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  6. With Web of Trust you can really see the difference with how a legitimate honest company responds to criticism, as opposed to Three Stars.

    In addition to Suurio's response mentioned above, WoT has actually gone out and responded on many of the sites and forums where this nonsense has been posted.

    Three Stars on the other hand, if they go out posting on other sites it's usually while pretending to be someone else or at least without revealing that they work there. They would never post responses to any criticism on their own site out of fear that more people would be made aware of it. There is only this curious creation:
    http://threestarsresponse.wordpress.com/
    Despite that they have tons of sites all linking to eachother for SEO purposes, this one isn't linked to from anywhere.

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  7. "Why is it okay for "regular people on internet forums" to act unethically, but in the same discussion expect a company to adhere to a higher standard of ethics? If you're going to expect the company to act responsibly, then you should expect the same of the people involved in the dialogue about that company."
    http://www.mywot.com/en/forum/4256-monkeyjar-affiliate-shopping-site

    No, that quote was not regarding the defamation campaign and the poster claims not to work for Three Stars (but apparently had a CellCo IP so...). It might help explain their mindset and how they justify this kind of crap. It's not as if we're likely to see an official response from Three Stars regarding the campaign.

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  8. The patronizing language at http://www.mywot.com/en/forum/4298-monkeyjar-affiliate-three-stars does seem almost identical to the mywot libel sites and the mods say that the poster ip matches the one you found. I guess its time for mywot to issue some subpoenas.

    About the legality of monkeyjar, its clearly a pyramid structure making unrealistic claims of returns. A financial commitment is required because it runs off affiliate commision. That is possible enough to make it illegal. The scheme is run by cj.com perhaps it should be brought to their attention.

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  9. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  10. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  11. As far as I know, Monkeyjar seems to be collecting personal data form something. Selling it is most likely, but I can't be sure- they've been fairly unpredictable lately.

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  12. They're at it again.

    www.internet-company.com (didn't see that one in your list). Found them posting on career builder anonymously.

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