DecorMyEyes Merchant Vitaly Borker Arrested After NYT Piece On Google Rankings | Hacker News Reader

DecorMyEyes Merchant Vitaly Borker Arrested After NYT Piece On Google Rankings

searchengineland.com

143 pointsbtilly43 comments

This is great and all, but this guy flagrantly broke the law many times and no one did anything. Do I need to have the New York Times publish an article if someone does something like this to me?

To prove your logic faulty, you just have to look at all the arrests for similar crimes where there was no NYT or any news article.

Right. So my logic is faulty based on arrests that weren't reported, are unverifiable, and as far as I know don't exist? Ok. I say your logic is faulty based on twice as many imaginary crimes where no arrest was made because there was no news article.

So my logic is faulty based on arrests that weren't reported, are unverifiable, and as far as I know don't exist?

Yep, it's faulty because you're assuming that just because you're not aware of something, that something doesn't exist. It may or may not exist.

In this case, I feel it's a reasonable assumption that there have been e-commerce related arrests that didn't make it in the media simply because they are no longer novel or newsworthy. It counters your suggestion that in order to get a similar arrest you must first be featured in a major publication. I disagree.

Example: People get busted on ebay all the time; only a small percentage of it gets reported somewhere and even a smaller percentage makes it to any big media. You can do a search on sites that archive court records to see volume of such arrests.

Ok, I see what you're getting at and I agree. My point was that this should have been one of those cases. It should have been stopped when it was just a petty criminal being an ass and not a national issue. I mean this guy was willing to talk about his case to the New York Times. He couldn't have been that good at doing this.

There's a bigger deterrent value when an arrest is made in a high-profile case.

I don't know, it seems like the opposite effect is in place: "Just don't go overboard and you'll be OK. And don't brag about it to the times: apologize and say you're working to improve her experience, and you get even better coverage. But the odds are still that you won't get caught in the first place."

Fair enough, but still. Don't you think it's a bit odd that they just happened to magically come up with enough evidence to arrest him a little bit more than a week after the article? To me, that says that at some point the police could have stopped him from gaining more victims instead of acting after it became an embarrassment.

He has been arrested before for how he treated his customers & the only outcome was that he didn't violent threats against customers anymore; he chose his words more carefully. It didn't even slow him down.

Moral: Don't do illegal shit

Criminal's Moral: Don't give out interviews

Hubris affects the law-abiding and law-breaking alike, and that guy had it in spades.

The amoral of the story is...

But think of all the traffic DecorMyEyes is seeing right now!

Not as good as these guys...

http://www.heavensgate.com/

For those that don't recall, the NYT article was mentioned here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945112

and here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1946085

I had a feeling it was going to come to this, and soon. He had the opposite strategy as Zappos and had the opposite "exit."

The bad guy in me sees an opportunity to 'googlebomb' competitors using fake bad reviews adding one more layer of complexity to this sort of thing.

They'd then have to figure out a way to distinguish the real bad reviews from the real good reviews and the fake bad reviews and the fake good reviews.

This whole arms race isn't helping anybody. And I wished the arrest would have taken place even if the guy had not bragged about it, but I highly doubt it. Likely there are many more characters like this guy happily doing it to lots of others every day, using their own websites but also on Ebay and lots of other places on the web.

Before you give out your credit card numbers, don't look for just that 'secure' icon in your browser, realize that the bar for getting a certificate, a corporate identity and a website up and running is sufficiently low that a determined scammer will not see this as a significant barrier to entry.

Knowing who you do business with is not enough to avoid getting screwed over.

That was the reason given for why Google isn't using naive sentiment analysis for ranking.

The bad guy in me sees an opportunity to 'googlebomb' competitors using fake bad reviews

In the spam world, it's very common. They call it joe-jobbing. Since spam websites typically have to be hosted on "bulletproof hosts"(hosts that won't shut you for complaints), "joe-jobbing" a site hosted with a regular host can have it shutdown temporarily with a very small amount of spam and the ensuing complaints. So you could hire a spammer for few hundred bucks to take your nice-guy competitor down by joe-jobbing him. Pretty sad.

My knowledge is a bit outdated but I am curious how folks deal with this now.

When I read the article, I was a bit suprised by how he almost seemed proud of his tactics to rip people off and later bully them. Particularly, the part where he said "I’ve exploited this opportunity because it works. No matter where they post their negative comments, it helps my return on investment. So I decided, why not use that negativity to my advantage?"

This guy should be the dumbest criminal in modern times. He understood how powerful the internet was, and then decided to ignore it.

Alternately, he didn't count on his boasting leading to embarrassment for the NYPD. Not a good strategy with your house in their jurisdiction.

By going to jail, this guy will likely get even more inbound links. It's extreme SEO.

He's an idiot for bragging on interviews. He's Russian but doesn't realize that this is not Russia and he can't go around threatening people.

He emigrated when he was a child and was raised in the US. I'm sure he's more familiar with the US legal system than whatever approximates one in Russia.

Obviously you've never been to Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn (where he lives). They call this part of Brooklyn, 'little Odessa' for a reason.

Apparently one can even live there for years and not know any English at all. "Why would I learn it? I don't go to USA".

Also there's a joke about two Russians in Brooklyn being asked direction to some place by a passer by (an American). They just shugged and the passer by went on. So one Russian tells another: "See, sure he can talk English, but what good did it do for him?".

Ha ha. I grew up and live in Sheepshead Bay.

I'm serious.

I used to live in that area, and I haven't heard a single person call it little Odessa. Granted we moved from the area when I turned 16, and we didn't live on Brighton Beach...but that just doesn't sound true.

Actually I just googled it out of interest and the top links for "Little Odessa" ("Маленькая Одесса") point to the movie with that name (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110365/). Maybe that's how the nickname became widespread?

This is like a little Christmas gift to all the hundreds of people this guy ripped off. Good riddance.

I've always found it funny that those who are innocent, or at least know they're going to be proved innocent, will generally walk into court with their heads held high. While the low down scumbags cover their faces and cower like people aren't going to know who they are.

This guy was a swivel chair and a cat away from being a Bond villain. Frankly, I'm surprised it took the NYPD that long to arrest him.

"No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to lose your Facebook account."

So basically you can threaten the lives of your customers and not fear any repercussions from law enforcement as long as the New York Times doesn't write a profile on you using your real name and location.

Not to mention the fact that all the consumer empowerment brought upon by social media has now been flipped on its head.

Is this the direction online commerce is heading? Its great that they nabbed the guy but the fact that he used the failings of the system to prop himself up for years is worrying. There are plenty more Vitaly Borkers out there waiting

>There are plenty more Vitaly Borkers out there waiting

Are there really that many businesses threatening their customers' lives? I've never heard of it before this guy.

Actually there was another story somewhere on HN (i think) about a guy who did the same thing, only with data recovery. He would hijack a drive or a computer's components and tell the customers they needed to pay more money before he'd return them, often threatening them and telling them to go on yelp if they were angry

Oh, right, I did read that.

this guy didn't merely cheat, he threatened. had he not crossed those (very obvious) bounds, i'm afraid this practice could have been fostered and tuned.

i can't help but wonder if the internet (Google, more specifically) could still help malicious businesses achieve disproportionate conversion.

Seems odd that Google had their big response, but it doesn't seem to be working in the case of his sites (see end of article).

Here's Google's incredibly vague blog post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-cus... - and HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959348

Whatever they've done, it seems to reportedly be affecting some queries but not others. The author of the searchengineland piece may have had to try a few queries to find one that ranked.

Proving once and for all that there is criminally bad customer service.

See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1977247 (register.co.uk link)

The borker borked.

Finally, the government oozes into action.

Hopefully, this fine fellow will be DecorMyAss in his next residence.

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