"My Story" (of why the FTC came after him for $300k) | Hacker News Reader

"My Story" (of why the FTC came after him for $300k)

prosmallbusiness.org

32 pointstptacek14 comments

A sockpuppet for this guy submitted this story, about a small business being taken for a ride by the FTC, and the VP/Engineering of that company being deliberately targeted despite having no role in advertising/marketing the product.

Only it turns out, that's not even close to the whole story. See the comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1761038

This story collected something like 80+ votes and a profoundly negative stream of comments before its sockpuppet promoter deleted it. I think it's worth looking at.

Can you repost your top comment from that thread? It was great detective work you did there in a very short amount of time.

Thanks.

Teaches one not to believe everything you read (I'm guilty as charged, both from this and Max Klein's stories)

It also looked suspiciously like he had some sockpuppet upvoters that the spam control missed. When I was there it was at 29 votes after 46 minutes.

But I don't know, maybe HN really is that gullible when it comes to governmental malfeasance.

No more of the upvotes were from newly created accounts than you'd expect for a story high on the front page. I think users are just suspicious of governments.

Any chance you could restore the link in the original thread? Sockpuppet McFakeAccount deleted it to stop the negative feedback from being connected to his original story. This thread is an attempt to reconnect it, but it's messier than restoring the original.

I've read into this story before and this guy is a scumbag. The really sad part in all of this is that he's pulling another scam by trying to make it seem like he's the victim and the FTC is destroying small businesses.

I haven't yet quite concluded that he's a scumbag, but it did raise my suspicions that he never mentioned what his business was or what the exact nature of the complaint was.

Check out this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1761410

Now observe that the FTC's complaint references email from Jason arguing with the rest of his team that they should continue doing this, because the account represents "all the margin" for his company.

wow

Yup, I didnt mean to come off sounding like someone who just throws a label at a person. But no this guy deserves the title scumbag whore. I follow his blog and even tried to email him to ask if these allegations were true, and he never responded. If you google it on the web there are people that have come forward proving they were scam by him.

Thanks for reposting this, but he claims it was $300K in legal fees, and an $850K settlement. Sounds like he got off light.

The original title of the post, as submitted, was something to the effect of "Why I settled with the FTC for 300k". Personally, though? I don't believe anything the author says.

Two questions:

1) Was this 'affiliate marketing' related?

2) Was the offer in question a 'rebill'?

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