SEO Company CEO Contracts Murderers to Kill Competition, Client Exposes All | Hacker News Reader

SEO Company CEO Contracts Murderers to Kill Competition, Client Exposes All

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I had a nasty bout with an SEO marketer a few years ago. He had taken content from my website and other assets of mine without permission or advance request. I was willing to overlook it as an inevitable cost of doing business.

But when he started to steal my customer reviews word for word and posting them as fake reviews, I became irate. I guess I am OK with someone stealing from me but I felt the reviews were my customer's property, not mine. When I confronted him he started spamming my business and then wrote detailed fake blog posts about how I was criminal hacker that now works covertly for the FBI. My name and photoshopped images were posted on gay websites for bondage sex. I Googled very poorly for a while, especially my images. I lost many many nights of sleep over this and I probably lost a contract over it.

I eventually found where he lived and fortunately he owned his own home. I threatened to sue him and take his home. He removed all the libelous posts shortly after that.

After all had been settled, a few months later he wrote me asking if I wanted to partner with him on a project, demonstrating a pathological lack of awareness. Apparently tormenting me had just been another fun day at the office and not a memorable event. I ignored him and never heard back.

My personal experience does make me wonder if the subject in the parent article was motivated to kill his competitors just for profit. Or did he and his competitors have had a nasty on-going personal war that just kept escalating. Not that I would ever justify attempted murder. Just saying...

edits: grammar, clarity.

well that escalated quickly. Hope I never have to get into a situation like this, happy to hear it got resolved.

Out of curiosity, why didn't you report these facts to the authorities? Fear of wasting time, or of retaliation, or something else?

Not the original poster but I feel that sometimes you just want it to be over even if taking a loss on it.

Not everyone is rich.

You don't need money to report to authorities, only to battle over in court.

I was talking about reporting a criminal case, not suing. With criminal cases it's the State which pays for everything, I think?

In my experience, having had two former employees of my mom’s shop and a strong arm robber arrested, it came down to me handing the police work to the detectives. The other complaints we filed, just to name one, another employee stealing inventory from mom’s shop in Manhattan and selling it to a vintage shop in Brooklyn went nowhere because we didn’t have surveillance in the store showing she stole it despite there being surveillance in the other shop showing she sold it. Or the time I caught a kid red handed with my bike, and the cops wouldn’t do anything because I didn’t have a bill of sale despite my ability to describe the bike and it’s serial number. They gave me the kid’s address and said if I demanded my bike back and he gave it to me, I could keep it. The kid was running a bicycle chop shop in his garage.

So yeah, if you want the cops to close a case, you need to help them and that costs money. Unless you get lucky and everything is obvious and the case closes itself. Or in case of a murder. They tend to actually put resources into solving murders. Or anything where they can reasonably seize loot. But property theft or damage doesn’t really register.

>... does very little to enhance our web presence in the first place and then never does anything further to improve our results. Complaints are met with excuses. In other words, ... ... a company that makes false promises and delivers little value.

SEO agencies in a nutshell.

Disclaimer: I'm a SEO.

digital snake-oil, idiots will always fall for it.

Don't confuse idiocy and being non-technical. SEO's confusing enough to many of us, let alone someone who's running a little family diner or something.

I think the point is that search-engine optimisation itself is a farce, perpetuated by confidence tricksters—some “SEO experts” do not know that they are conning people, charging people for useless reports, yesterday’s advice and for services that clients could just as easily handle themselves.

Obviously no offence should be intended towards victims of SEO cons, but the fact is that it’s a con, and that’s probably why it seems confusing to people without technical knowledge. I have been a web developer for nearly a decade and I still struggle to understand what value an SEO expert/agency is supposed to add.

Anyone honest in the field will say that if your website loads reasonably quickly, works on mobile phones and desktop, and comprises useful, quality, regularly-added content—pertinent to things that people actually search for—your website is more or less optimised for search and the rest requires time for search engines to crawl your website and for people to search for it, talk about it, etc.

This is the sort of thing that necessitates a good web developer/team and a good writer, and maybe someone to manage social media and press and stuff like that. You don’t need to pay money for some “SEO experts” to give you outdated advice and charge you monthly to provide automatically generated reports from services you could use yourself, for less money, and which provide almost pointless “ranking” measurements.

SEO activities of any value include reaching out to high-traffic, trustworthy websites to feature your site (this is PR) and to log into Google Webmaster Tools/Search Console to disavow any “spammy” links to your site (this is something anyone could do).

When I think of SEO, I think of doing a lot of the work you just described. Performance optimization, responsiveness, and especially content are things that SEOs advise on or even do the work directly. You even mention SEO activities of value such as reaching out to trustworthy sites for promotion, or using webmaster tools. These are the exact things that SEOs do - either you've had a bad experience or you're just misinformed. And to say that anyone could do this for stuff is moot - anyone can do anything if they have the time to learn and desire to do it. Most clients have neither when it comes to SEO.

    "anyone can do anything if they have 
    the time to learn and the desire to do it."

Sorry, but that argument doesn't work for SEO in my opinion. It's no big investment of time to learn about SEO, it would take most people a couple of days tops. I've just outlined a fair chunk of it above, as you pointed out. If I can summarise what SEO people do in a paragraph, how does that justify their cost? It's not like they charge $20 a month.

Hell, all the information required (these days) is provided freely by Google itself. You can literally download an app which teaches you how to market your business on the web. You say you need the desire to learn SEO. Well, I think any CEO would find a desire to flip through Google Primer and some web pages about mobile-friendliness and content-quality if I told them it would save them thousands of dollars a month.

    "either you've had a bad experience
    or you're just misinformed."

While I appreciate your condescending tone, I must sadly reveal that I am not "misinformed" about SEO experts and agencies — I speak from experience after having worked alongside some of these magic consultants at a couple of companies where I was a front-end developer.

I have sat in on meetings with "SEO experts" and "PPC specialists" with the exact purpose of calling them out on their bullshit, which I did on several occasions, because they were charging the company thousands/tens of thousands to do something that an intern could do, after perhaps a day or two's worth of training, and for less money. And an intern is a much better investment in the long term.

Sure, there are some honest SEO guys out there, but my point is that the honest SEO guys are not worth paying to do what your business should have or should be doing already — a good website and producing marketing ammunition, respectively.

SEO is something that should be an automated service by now.

well, sometimes it's even a more or less sophisticated scam (blaming it on idiots is too short sighted)

a simple blueprint of the most common seo scam:

1) sell them something external that does not create additional work for the client and assign value to it i.e.: links, linkbuilding services, tools, ...

2) disable feedack loops (it takes x month until you see an impact, introduce "magic numbers" seo tools)

3) wait & take money (a.k.a. deplete ressources that the client might use for otherwise improvement)

4) trigger value creating project i.e.: better targeted title tags, sitemap.xml, responsive, webperformance, ...

5) see immidiate benefits

6) assign impact to 1)

7) addiction / lock-in cycle completed

Except some of those things are legit. It can in fact take multiple months to see real movement in the SERPs. Value is added by fixing tagging and such.

There are a lot of snake oil salesmen just like in and industry, but some of these things don't belong on that list.

Coming from a post-Soviet period, I am surprised a bit that this doesn't happen more often. Company owners would be killed seemingly without much worry if they crossed anyone powerful.

I was doing homework one night and felt the house shake, I thought it was an earthquake. It turns out a bomb went off in a 5 story apartment building nearby. Someone was trying to kill a banker so they left a bomb by their door.

I just wonder if it's not sometimes better to be invisible, even if it means little poorer.

Yes, I'm surprised how celebrities and CEOs of big corporations live so long... In spite of the bodyguards.

It's hard to appreciate the sheer number of people that exist in the world... Surely there are enough crazy people to populate an entire city.

Is it possible that intelligence is inversely correlated with insanity? I thought it was the opposite.

Insanity is related to the ego mind. The more control the ego mind has then the less input and influence the heart has - the less empathy exists and the more willingness to cause harm as a valid survival mechanism. It's really quite a scary proposition to go against the wished upon status quo of people and organizations who are like this - who become comfortable with this.

This behaviour seems only steered away through fear of getting caught. If there is little fear of being caught or of being prosecuted, then this behaviour will be as rampant as it can be without calling too much attention - or those like journalists who do call attention to it will also make the list to be assassinated/murdered in the most extreme cases. There are more covert things people could do to simply ruin someone's life by doing actions indirectly.

There's only about 8k people who are 1 in 1k crazy and 1 in 1k capable, assuming independent traits.

If you restrict that to even 1 in 20 violent, then you're talking 400 people world wide.

Factor out kids, elderly, etc and you're talking 200 really scary motherfuckers. Figure 75% are employed by governments, and you're talking 50 rogue badasses -- which seems vaguely in line with the number of really dangerous terrorists, paramilitaries, etc.

My guess is that the number of people that are both interested and capable of the things you propose are busy making tons of cash on drugs, terrorist violence elsewhere, etc.

I got roughly 379 people, using current world population (http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/) and not including your last step of factoring out kids and elderly, because that should have been done in the (1 in 1k capable) step.

Can you explain how you came up with these numbers? Intuitively I have always thought they were low, due to the small incidence of terrorist attacks, but I am curious to where you come up with your base numbers.

I made them up.

But they're reasonable bounds -- the number of terrorists are very low, we know this for a fact. So we should suspect that the contributing traits are relatively rare. And if we want to talk about people who really scare us, then it should be people who are real outliers.

An NFL player is a one in a few hundred thousand, and an NFL star is around one in a million. So if we're looking for the Tom Brady of terrorists, it would make sense that we don't want a fraction substantially higher than the number of Tom Brady's in football players.

So I cut off a segment of the population that would have the traits required and estimated how large it was -- 99.9th percentile capable, 99.9th percentile crazy, 95th percentile violent. (Intuitively -- if the smartest and craziest kid in your high school were the same kid (1 in 1000 each trait), then you picked the most violent in 20 of those kids.)

This turns out to be ~400 people, which seems ballpark right. I'd certainly expect the answer to be in the 120-1,200 person range.

As long as your estimates aren't too far off and you aren't systemically wrong (eg, always rounding down), estimating is usually a reasonably accurate method to get a feel for the scale of something.

While the US is by no means perfect, it has a functioning justice system that isn't corrupt enough that people feel like they can get away with murder.

Unless they have badges.

Or affluenza. Rich people don't go to prison in America, the ones that do are the rare exceptions.

I think it probably does happen fairly often. This banker(1) was killed a few miles from me in his upscale neighborhood in Germany when I was a kid. My friend heard the bomb as he lived only a few blocks away.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Herrhausen*

In many ways, Shadowrun is coming to life. Corporate espionage and hits are becoming literal. It's rather scary in thought.

It doesn't happen more often because in an environment like that, the mere threat is enough.

I don’t know which is worse, the story topic or Medium’s floating “open in app” desperate plea.

Someone posted a Show HN[0] here a while ago to fix this, and I use it everyday
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15123638

What is worse?
[ ] Medium’s floating “open in app" desperate plea [x] Someone hiring a killer to kill his competitor
My pleasure.

Read the article!
"Victim-1 and PHILLIPS were former business partners and are currently business competitors."
It's not like he's offing SEO competitors at random. He knew and worked with the victim personally.

Reminiscent of laser eye surgeon Mockovak putting a hit on his business partner and fellow laser eye surgeon King. [0]
[0] http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Renton-laser-eye-surg...

So the government caught this guy in a Sting. What would even motivate such an operation? I have heard of Traps being laid out for potential pedophiles, drug addicts etc. Buy why would they go after this kind of criminal preemptively?

FTA: "The investigation revealed that PHILLIPS engaged another individual, who has since become a cooperating defendant (“CD-1”), to commit a murder of an identified victim (“Victim-1”)"
As I read it, the potential hitman became a defendant after Phillips attempted to hire him. The potential hitman wasn't LE or on LE's side before that.

I was very suspicious when I read the article. It didn't seem to link to any government websites or newspapers, but I did find a story about the activity in the LA Times [0].
[0] http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ceo-murder-for-h...

It links to court document.

Today one would think Tor and Bitcoin to be involved.
But no - classic meeting with the killer and handing over a (faked) image of the victim.

The scariest part here is that surgeons are concerned with being "marketing experts". Single payer.

Non closable pop-up window.

Surely he knew the photograph was fake, and just engaged in this transaction to send a message to his competition.

I'm sure Homeland Security can gin up a convincing-looking murder scene photo.

That sounds like a reference to something. Was that claimed by or for Ulbricht?

SEO is dirtier than I thought.

I'm not sure we can blame an entire industry because of one sociopath.

>SEO >industry
Snakeoil is more like it.

But not by much.

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