WebProNews » Crooks

SEO Firm Banned For Life By FTC

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 21 May 2007 21:45:45 +0000

Netvertise, Inc. and owner Elliot Krasnow were banned for life from promoting or selling franchises or business opportunities by the Federal Trade Commission.

The FTC alleges the company violated federal law by selling franchises for Website design, promotion services, and SEO software under false claims.

In addition to the ban, Netvertise will have to return $160,000 to its customers, as part of a settlement, which is not technically an admission of guilt.

The FTC claims the company inflated the earnings customers would make with their services and Netspace SEO software to lure franchise buyers.

In addition, the FTC was none to pleased to learn that Krasnow, who’d been in trouble with them before, back in 1990, for misrepresentations about rare coins he was selling, didn’t disclose his checkered past to franchisees as required by law.

The rare coins mess 17 years ago cost Krasnow $400,000.

And now, he and his company are banned offline and on the Web from promoting or selling franchises or business opportunities.

Netvertise sold its franchises for between $20,000 and $100,000, offering various Web services to small- and medium-sized businesses, including the construction and promotion of Websites, use of email marketing, and off-site data protection.

The franchise also included Netspace’s SEO software, which Netvertise promised would create Websites that ranked on the first page of search engine results pages.

The FTC says Krasnow’s company misrepresented franchise incomes with unsubstantiated earnings claims, overstated the value of the Netspace software, and that the Netvertise provided consumers with "defective" disclosure documents.

No earnings claim documents were provided to franchisees.

The lifetime ban from the franchise and promotion business is covered under the Franchise Rule and the Business Opportunity Rule.

The FTC brought similar charges against Netfran Development Corp., also run by Krasnow, but the defendant was dismissed on May 9 of this year.

Dude, Dell’s Getting Sued

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 17 May 2007 11:16:38 +0000

Poor customer service and deceptive advertising by Dell have led New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to sue the computer maker.

Dude, Dell’s Getting Sued

Cuomo dropped by Albany County Supreme Court to file a lawsuit against Dell, one of the biggest computer manufacturers in the world. The suit blasted Dell for using a variety of deceptive business practices on an ongoing basis.

Joyner, Waas To Blog Libby Trial

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 15:11:18 +0000

The first two credentialed bloggers to gain access to a federal trial should begin their blogging next week, after Media Bloggers Association president Robert Cox wraps up his voir dire (jury selection) coverage.

James Joyner from Outside The Beltway and Murray Waas from Crooks and Liars will take two of the one hundred seats allocated to mainstream media when the Scooter Libby trial begins. That should start next week, according to Cox.

In an email to WebProNews, Cox noted he was covering the voir dire process. A post on his personal blog, Words In Edgewise, described what Joyner and Waas, and the bloggers to follow them, can expect in the federal courthouse:

The room set up as a media center is ideal for a blogger. There is a widescreen television displaying four feeds from the video camera – the judge, the witness box, a crossshot of both and the lawyer’s desks. The Wifi worked perfectly and I was online within a minute of getting into the room.

My plan is to be here this week to make sure that the bloggers that follow behind me have a good sense of what to expect when they arrive at the courthouse. Later I will write up a “protocol” document to share with all of the bloggers. The good news is that we get real chairs, room enough on a long table to work with a laptop, powerstrips and, of course, the WiFi. I would show you a picture but…well…they took my camera.

Recording devices are not permitted in the courtroom, as US District Judge Reggie Walton decreed in the rules of order for the case. Violating that means a likely contempt sanction from the bench.

Likewise, bloggers and other media types have to keep their credentials available, because the US Marshals may ask for them at any point. Cox said in his blog that the ones they have received are the only ones they will physically get, and if they are lost, so is access to the courtroom.

Call them bloggers, citizen journalists, or anything else, the accomplishment of gaining media access to what will be a heavily covered trial is quite a feat. Just as people follow the events of the trial, other bloggers will watch what Joyner, Waas, and others do in the setting. Get ready for some strong opinions from the blogosphere about that.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

LiveJournal Protest Tops Nielsen List

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 21:49:53 +0000

The most popular blog post of 2006 landed on a LiveJournal blog, while missives from Michelle Malkin, Dave Sifry, and CrooksAndLiars.com ranked among the most linked 100 posts for the past year.

“You are here because you have a problem with the way livejournal.com is being run graphically; obstructive interfaces popping up (ie: customize area); lack of customer-service displayed by the team in relation to ‘rebuilding’ the site (ie: one of the many truths); or clearly insane string of ‘fiddle-faddle’ from the Support Team, who is giving positive feedback where negativity is required.”

That’s the opening paragraph for a petition against LiveJournal interface changes, posted June 16th, 2006 and linked to by nearly 800 unique authors.

According to research from Nielsen Buzzmetrics, the LiveJournal post handily edged out a trio of entries from Crooks And Liars. The August 2006 ‘State of the Blogosphere’ post by Technorati founder Dave Sifry rounded out that top five.

Crooks And Liars occupied 22 places on the Buzzmetrics list of top 100 blog posts for 2006, the most of any blog. Malkin had 18 spots, while sites like Engadget, Think Progress, and Boing Boing also held multiple places in the roster.

Google’s Official Blog had eleven posts make the group. Their most linked post was one about the company’s acquisition of Writely, the online word processor.

Google also served as the topic of discussion for the fifteenth most-linked post. That one came from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which expressed concerns about Google Desktop and recommended consumers not use the product.

A few well-known sites with significant traffic did not have a lot of places referring to their posts, though, as Nielsen noted:

Some regularly-cited top bloggers did not make the top post list, including Gizmodo, Huffington Post, Techcrunch, and Gawker. Daily Kos had just one post on the list (#85, a transcript of Stephen Colbert’s White House correspondents dinner speech).

We have to close with the 25th most-linked post, to the intrepid Amanda Congdon, whose arrival at the House of Mouse as an ABC News featurette began with her July departure from Rocketboom.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Zotob Crooks Nabbed By Microsoft

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 14:03:48 +0000

If you’re going to be a high profile cyber criminal, might as well have the names to match. The FBI has tracked down the creators of the infamous Zotob worm that caused grief for Windows users worldwide. Their names? Atilla and Diabl0. Apropos, I think.

They’re young super villains, too. Farid Essebar (a.k.a. Diabl0), an 18-year-old Russian-born Moroccan, was nabbed by Moroccan police for creating the worms Zotob and Mytob as well as the Rbot bot worm.

Meanwhile, in Turkey, Turkish authorities picked up 21-year-old Atilla Ekici (a.k.a. Coder), who paid Diabl0 for his work and distributed the worms that infected thousands of PCs.

Microsoft’s Internet Crime Investigations Team was instrumental in aiding the FBI to track down the source of the nasty viruses. The team began monitoring Zotob last week and followed the electronic trail back to the source.

Microsoft’s offering of a $250,000 reward apparently yielded little.

“The arrests were not made based on a tip-off; they were based on our Internet Crime Investigations Team,” said Microsoft’s Brad Smith.