Complaint Review: Extortionnews.googlepages.com William Stanley - Phoenix Nationwide

If you are trying to deal with negative online statements, SEO companies might seem like your best (or only) choice.  DON'T BE FOOLED.  Many of these services are incredibly dishonest and will just take your money and leave you worse than you are now.

Things have gotten so bad, some of the SEO guys out there are setting up mirrors of Rip Off Report posts because their stock in trade is to sanitize the reputation of those that are really bothered by the posts.  If you contact them for help with one or two posts, they will try to create MORE negative posts about you so you become even more desperate.  They hope you are so concerned by your post you will hire them to push back the bad post. They promise they can remove the reports about them, and in some cases they can, but only because they have full control of those sites.  But, there is only one problem - they cannot ever remove a rippoff report and this is great for these SEO companies.  So, they continue to string their customer (who has negative stories about them) that they can keep ripoffreport on page 2 or 3, but they need to continue to pay them thousands of dollars every month to do so. But, that really wont end up happening either. After a few weeks the story listed on ripoffreport.com will end right back on page 1. By this time they have soaked tens of thousands of dollars from the business trying to hide complaints about them. Some people have reported these companies are real real nice at the beginning, they then turn into nasty monsters, threatening them, if they dont continue to pay, they will make things worse for them.

SO, HOW DO YOU KNOW WHO THEY ARE?  Unfortunately, you can't tell. They use different names.  Some of these companies do set up a legitimate bank account and do what is stated above. They get bank accounts by putting them into their girlfriend (at the time) name, or use some stolen identity.

The ones you know for sure doing this are the ones demanding cash up front.

You must send them a western union money order. Or WIRE them money to their bank account.

They also use other (what seems to be) legitimate SEO companies that advertise their legitimate services to help build a companies reputation. But those (what seems to be) legitimate companies dont tell you that they are out-sourcing the REMOVE RIPOFF REPORT work to get complaints on the Internet removed to another company they will pay, once youve forked over thousands of dollars. The only complaint site they cannot get removed, (even if you sue them) would be ripoffreport.com. Again, they will only tell you they can move it down to page 2 or 3, but, it will always come back. And potential customers will always find them.

Companies like pissedconsumer.com and complaintsboard.com are 2 sites that started their website by copying all the reports on ripoffreport.com. It is unclear what (if anything) ripoffreport.com did about it.

How do I know all this? Because this all happened to me. After I was threatened and my family blackmailed to keep paying them until I decided to just close down my business. I then did some research and found others who have been taken by these companies and threatened as I have.

I then did some research and found these different links, apparently, Ed Magedson and his ripoffreport.com has had the same problems with these different companies.

http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/arizona/azdce/2:2007cv00954/344869/96/0.pdf

http://news.cnet.com/Police-Blotter-Dark-side-of-reputation-defending-service/2100-1030_3-6194158.html 

As a business that has been reported on ripoffreport.com I would say, I still dont like Magedson's policies. But it seems like what everyone has accused ripoffreport.com of doing is not true. Those companies that advertise remove ripoffreport  (just google remove ripoffreport remove complaints repair your reputation defend your reputation defend your name) you will find thousands of companies making these claims. They are all owned by a small hand full of people. Creating sites, by copying what is on ripoffreport.com, getting it ranked high, then, setting up another company that will contact your company that was reported, (like my company) soaking you for every penny they can and not doing what they promised. They can only remove the complaints on the sites they have created.

I also noticed another problem. One you have an SEO do work for you, it seems like search engines like Google will add the words scam or complaint next to your name when you start to type in your name into the search engine. The final blow to your business. I would imagine that these SEO companies are playing with the search engines listings, and the search engines are not happy about this and they are not stupid. It seems to me this is payback by the search engines. I have 2 companies with different complaints. The complaints on both companies have been around for about 3 years. The company I had SEO work preformed, now when you type in the company name, the word scam and complaint is offered by Google. The company I did not pay to have SEO work done does not have that problem. Everyone I found who has been ripped off by these SEO companies all have the same exact problem with this and other things I described above.

The bottom line is that if you hire an SEO company to try and hide online complaints, you are taking a BIG risk....you could end up with MORE complaints and MORE negative visibility on Google than before, and all of this after you already paid big bucks to someone you have never met.

Don't do it!!!