Ripoff Report

Ripoff Report is an extortion racket enabled by Google and section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to profit from destroying lives and businesses. It has an estimated annual income of between 5 and 25 million USD.

Ripoff Report:

  • Publishes unverified ‘reports’ about individuals and businesses under the guise of providing a forum for free speech;
  • Publishes extreme abusive, defamatory, homophobic, misogynistic, and race hate content (these links are just samples and there are tens of thousands of more pages on the website);
  • Charges an exorbitant amount to ‘rehabilitate’ reputations in the Google index (see below to a link to download the costs);
  • Is owned by a person, Ed Magedson, who in Forbes referred to misogynistic, homophobic and race hate content as his ‘comic’ section.
  • In that article Magedson stated that it earned millions of dollars a year from advertising;
  • Pays individuals to write false and damaging content about people and businesses (a video in which a former employee boasts about this employment can be downloaded from my cloud drive here).
  • Conducts sustained and targeted campaigns against those who stand up to the owner.
  • Creates damaging content to extort money.
  • Includes a vast amount of abuse including defamatory, misogynistic, homophobic, and race hate content that has been ignored by the Chairman of Alphabet Inc, Professor John L Hennessy since 2013.

View of a US Court

In 2011 a US judgement labelled the website’s business practices as ‘appalling’:

The business practices of Xcentric, as presented by the evidence before this Court, are appalling. Xcentric appears to pride itself on having created a forum for defamation. No checks are in place to ensure that only reliable information is publicized. Xcentric retains no general counsel to determine whether its users are availing themselves of its services for the purpose of tortious or illegal conduct.
Even when, as here, a user regrets what she has posted and takes every effort to retract it, Xcentric refuses to allow it.

 

Moreover, Xcentric insists in its brief that its policy is never to remove a post. It will not entertain any scenario in which, despite the clear damage that a defamatory or illegal post would continue to cause so long as it remains on the website, Xcentric would remove an offending post.

Removal of Content 

Ripoff Report says it never removes content, but this is a lie. It has:

  • Removed ‘reports’ about its owner, Ed Magedson. Examples can be downloaded from this link (virus free private cloud drive). This is easy to verify by checking the report numbers and a website search.
  • Altered a ‘report’ referencing Google owners Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Ripoff Report changed the name on a webpage alleging that one of the the owners of Google, and Sergey Brin molested a woman after this ‘report’ was referenced in article by a well known SEO author. The name change was admitted by Ripoff Report attorneys in a document filed in one of the many cases in which it has been a defendant in the USA.

Many ordinary people cannot pay what can amount to thousands of dollars to remove content from Google and other search engines that falsely name them as ‘paedophiles’, ‘whores’, ‘murderers’, ‘skanks’ and ‘drug abusers’. They face global public humiliation, the ruin of their careers and businesses, and have to live with the fear that their children will be harmed or cyberbullied. Individuals, families and small businesses are rendered socially, vocationally, emotionally and financially paralysed by this criminal operation.

The despair caused by Magedson is reflected in the comments on this petition to Google to remove the website (mouse over view next to the comments) and this website. 

Anyone who challenges Madgeson on his methods of extortion, including me, has found that they are suddenly the subject of further content on Ripoff Report written by one of his flunkies or that the number of reports or links to reports suddenly multiplies.

Ripoff Report Corporate Advocacy Program (CAP)

Ripoff Report has removed content about businesses and individuals for an exorbitant fee. Payment to Ripoff Report results in removal of the reputation damaging content from the Google search engine via its Corporate Advocacy Program (CAP). The costs can amount to tens of thousands of dollars. The schedule of fees can be down loaded here.

Alternatively ‘Arbitration’ costs USD$2,000 per webpage plus extra for comments. 

This video and this video were recently posted on YouTube from business owners that Ripoff Report has recently tried to shakedown.

These screenshots show a Google search for a business,  Lucas Car Care, before and after payment to Ripoff Report’s CAP: