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duxup

If there's no evidence to support their claims / the claims are false... I get that.

>Defendant made no attempt to engage in the Claimant's dispute resolution process.

That worries me. I have to contact the organization and jump through their hoops before I leave a poor review?

Hopefully that's not the only standard here and just some additional information added to the rest.

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Not before you leave a poor review but before you accuse them of being a scammer. They didn't sue for the poor review, they sued for defamation. There's an important difference there.

I feel like that's a critical detail that's missing from the headline. He didn't just say "these guys are a bunch of jerkbags and you shouldn't do business with them" he said "this company is operating a scam." That's not an opinion, it's a specific accusation like saying "I went in and they beat me with a pipe."

Would it be a scam if you paid for work X, but were given work Y which should cost much less than work X and is useless to you?

If I paid a mechanic to put on new tires, but he just rotated my tires instead and said that he had fulfilled his side of the deal - is that not a scam?

I think this an interesting collision between common use of language and legal use of language. I think it's reasonable for the solicitors here to say that they were accused of running an illegal fraudulent operation affecting multiple people. I also think it's reasonable for the defendant to say that he was personally scammed. If you read the judgement it appears the law sides with the first interpretation so if you're going to accuse a business of running a scam, you better first make sure there are other victims besides yourself.

This is kind of a surprise to me and why I thought it was worth bringing up. Wouldn't it be nice if this issue was clarified in the BBC article perhaps with some helpful advice about how to deal with poor service or indeed genuine scammers while avoiding being accused of libel.

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