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Pastimes : Investment Chat Board Lawsuits -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geoffrey Wren who wrote (12229)	9/29/2017 4:43:54 PM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	2 Recommendations Recommended By SI Dmitry (code monkey) smaycs4 Respond to of 12465

In your IRS scenario, the scammers are hoping they ensnare someone who coincidentally is having some dispute with the IRS, or perhaps has not filed a tax return. No different than when I get phishing emails telling me my account at a bank I've never used needs me to confirm my account details. These are numbers games where the scammer is counting on a gullible subset of those who might have a tax problem, or bank at that bank. In this situation, the odds of a random takedown notice affecting such a relatively small group of websites doesn't seem to fall into that category. These guys are not looking to then scam money from whoever replies by scaring them. As the authors wrote in the article I cited, the culprits here were likely making their money from whoever hired them to take down specific content that offended them. But rather than sue these companies to take the page down, they go after Google's indexing so nobody can find the story to begin with. All Google needs is a purported injunction. I say "purported" because when Google gets an injunction, rather than make the effort to figure out its authenticity, they shift that burden to the company hosting the targeted web page to dispute it. For good measure, to make fighting a purported injunction difficult, these scammers often file suits against fake people, then trick the court into thinking the fake defendant has agreed to an injunction in order to get them to OK it. As the intent was to fool Google, once that's done, they abandon the lawsuit. This is quite similar to what used to happen with defamation on the net here in the 90s. If you wanted to shut a well-spoken real person up, you would find someone using an alias who was a bit dicey and sue both, claiming you truly thought they were the same person. Rather than spend $10K to hire a lawyer to defend themselves, these well-spoken real people would choose to delete their legitimate posts and offer an apology. It was essentially blackmail. - Jeff