Jesse Willms, the Dark Lord of the Internet | Hacker News Reader

Jesse Willms, the Dark Lord of the Internet

theatlantic.com

135 points67726e46 comments

This guy is a criminal. Why does The Atlantic paint him as some kind of marketing genius? If people knew how they were going to be charged for his products and services, they never would've hit the Buy button. He tricks people, which is not a talent IMO. I'm Canadian and from Edmonton, and I'm embarrassed that this fool lives on this side of the 49th.

I suspect The Atlantic's legal department may have had some input during the editing of this piece. Look at the section of the OA that reads (my emphasis in italic)

"That May, Decker filed the FTC’s suit against him. (Willms, I should note, has never been charged with any crime; the FTC’s authority is civil, not criminal.) The complaint accused Willms of nine separate infractions, from illegally charging consumers’ credit cards to deceiving customers about “risk free” offers and outside endorsements."

The article seemed pretty balanced actually. He is not a convicted criminal thanks to unfortunate loopholes..

Tracking his business closely would be a good opportunity for legislators looking to reform payment systems. But any reform would have to affect a whole class of payments designed based on human psychological defects. I.e. a good reform is a big battle with most phone companies, gyms, etc.

I found it funny to reach the end and see their affiliate marketing... So, thanks "theatlantic", and I would fund your article through what sounds like a very legitimate affiliate retirement plan, but Jesus is already a part of my father's retirement plan. (He swears to him he'll never retire.)

this guy exists because of the "dont do evil" googles and the yahoos that are willing to work with him even when they know he is a scammer. Because they make a lot of money with people like him,it's their core business.

Who is the real criminal in that story ? the guy is an horrible individual sure, yet he is insanely rich now thanks to the googs and the yahs.

Not defending the guy but it would appear from the article that he isn't a criminal, because there is no charge for breaking the spirit of the law, only the actual law. The recurring charges are legal because the terms are on the checkout page.

It's out and out scamming but it appears to be difficult to prosecute.

I'm not condoning his actions by any means, but by most accounts Willms is an exceptional marketer. I say this as someone who has spent the better part of the previous decade in the affiliate industry, and although I've never personally interacted with Jesse I do know several people that have. That said, I've never heard of anyone in the affiliate game refer to Jesse as a "legend" as this author proclaims, but he is respected for his creative advertising techniques. Simply put, his relentless pursuit in optimizing his marketing message is often what made his products convert visitors into customers at a much higher rate than any of his equally-shady competitors.

Every company and entrepreneur has to trick people into buying their product. Anyone who has worked in sales or has seen it up close knows this. You cannot sell people anything by providing them with mere facts and convincing them of the correctness of those facts. You have to convince them to trust you and your product, to believe it will deliver what it promises, completely independent of overwhelming factual evidence.

Example: we have first hand experience with the following: we did a pilot project and the project manager personally testified that we saved them 500K in costs, at a < 50K expense. Nevertheless we had a hard time selling the company our product for use in other projects.

You have to trick people into buying your product, even if you know it's objectively in their best interest. So yes, this guy definitely has a useful talent.

TLDR:

Between 2007 and 2011, the lawsuit claimed, Willms defrauded consumers of some $467 million by enticing them to sign up for “risk free” product trials and then billing their cards recurring fees for a litany of automatically enrolled services they hadn’t noticed in the fine print. In just a few months, Willms’s companies could charge a consumer hundreds of dollars like this, and making the flurry of debits stop was such a convoluted process for those ensnared by one of his schemes that some customers just canceled their credit cards and opened new ones.

ie. this guy basically used the brokenness of credit card recurring charge management systems to steal small amounts of money from many dumber consumers on a recurring basis, and became filthy rich in the process. Apparently without actually breaking any laws... but In the end, Willms’s arguments won little sympathy in court.

Re: "in the end": Except it didn't matter, since he kept all the cash and is still doing it today.

To a certain extent this behavior is nothing new. The 12 CD's for a penny scams I fell pray to as a child come to mind. The people who think like that have just moved online.

One thing I don't see getting much attention here is the section on regulation and the lack of interest by tech companies who provide the platforms for people like this to exploit on.

Quoting part of the article, "... the tech companies that carry those ads tend to throw up their hands an declaim that the web is so huge that no one could hope to monitor it all."

This section of the article, where Edelman is quoted several times, stood out to me. It made me a little more sympathetic to regulation. In that, if there is no incentive inside the large tech companies to identify and punish or eliminate the Jesse Williams of the world from their platforms, why shouldn't they be held accountable for the consequences of the behavior enabled by the platform they developed?

One more quotes that stood out to me and made sense:

- "If Jesse Williams is responsible for the bad things his contractors did, why is Google not responsible for the bad things its advertisers did?"

To extend on that and not just limit this to Google - Uber recently got some bad publicity in LA. One incident where someone was charged several hundred dollars for what amounted to a cab ride home to from a bar and another where an uber rider left their cell phone in the car. Then the driver held the phone ransom for several hundred dollars and still never returned it. In the one case Uber suspended the drivers account and was trying to help the phone owner.

The point I am trying to make by bringing up Uber, who is not an advertising company, is as follows. Technology extends and scales human ability. But the onus is still on people to use technology morally, ethically & responsibly. The double edge on technology's sword is that not all people make choices with morals or ethics in mind. So, is a technology provider responsible for self policing their platform? Idk but reading the Atlantic article sway my opinion in the direction of, If the technology provider won't or "can't" be responsible then they open the doors for regulation without any sympathy from me.

> To a certain extent this behavior is nothing new. The 12 CD's for a penny scams I fell pray to as a child come to mind.

I'm not sure that I'd call that a scam. Myself and several of my friends were legitimate customers and never had any issues.

If it were a scam, though, it certainly worked both ways. I worked for Columbia House as a teenager ("data entry"), entering in all those applications that people sent in. We received an absurd number of obviously bullshit applications (e.g.: "Mickey Mouse", "Donald Duck", etc.) -- sometimes one after another, all with the same address and handwriting -- but were told to enter them in anyways.

Perhaps scam is the wrong word? Like the online affiliate model, there was quite a bit of fine print that I did not read. Notably the part (I'm paraphrasing here) where I get charged and continue to get charged if certain conditions are not met. As a 10 year old perhaps scam is the wrong word. But, to me, it feels very similar to the affiliate model of advertising online today.

I think they substantially underplayed how much the large tech companies are doing to prevent scam ads.

The evidence I have to back up that point is the case of "google charged the advertiser more" for it being somehow lower quality. That appears to me to be a very biased interpretation of how Adsense charges to maximize ecpm. Googles algorithms know that click through rates are low so they increase the price, the algo doesn't know why the click through rates are low.

The article also spent about zero time discussing how they fight spam and only said the companies say "we remove bad ads as fast as we can."

Judges throw out cases like the woman mentioned who got scammed because the preponderance of evidence is in favor of the company acting with good faith, not because they have a vested interest in perpetuating large internet company profits.

Further, the article plays fast and loose with the distinction between "our network is enormous, we do everything we can, but can't feasibly prevent every single case of spam" and "we don't do anything about spam."

By jumping between "every single case" and "anything" the author paints a complacent picture out of behavior that is anything but.

If that article left you newly strongly supporting internet regulation, I think you got scammed by the author.

Finally, we get to see the face of the creator of those "1 weird tip" ads. Now if him and the woman who created those dumb dancing lowermybills ads would get together we'd have a real turd bomb in the making.

There's nothing "genius" about ripping people off over and over again, it just takes a high degree of disrespect for your fellow man. That and, jesus, if you're going to make your living as a scam artist at least hire a web designer that doesn't make every one of your websites look so obviously shoddy and awful.

Why bother with victims smart enough to fight back later, if you can have poorest of souls, incapable of reasoning that behind shoddy website might be a shoddy business?

That is supposedly among the reasons for those 419 scams and the like to use shoddy writing and stories. You want to eliminate those that can fight back. A bit like mugging the little old lady instead of the 6'5" bodybuilder.

It also reminds me a bit of insects that evolved to be flashy to demonstrate that they are poisonous. The sort of reverse camouflage stops all but the most foolish predators from partaking.

The poor-quality web design is by intent. Users think they are dealing with a small business trying to sell its merchandise online without a fancy web team. It's like con artists who dress poorly to look like their mark. More credible.

Alternatively, the poor quality ensures that only rubes will click through. Why PPC for people who are going to be skeptical anyway?

Off topic rant: why in the world does that site take nearly half a minute to load completely and why does it keep jumping around to different sections (eventually leaving me at the bottom of the screen) during that absurd load?

I'm still not sure about the jumping but the load time might be the result of:

  370 requests  ❘  4.0 MB transferred  ❘  45.30 s (load: 41.60 s, DOMContentLoaded: 19.41 s)

Edit: typo and more data

Ghostery counts 19 or 20 trackers depending on what you want included. It's getting out of control!

I block everything and I get 25 blocked when visiting The Atlantic. Probably the worst site I've seen yet.

Disconnect counts 45.

Obligatory NoScript and RequestPolicy plugs: That page loaded in just over a second for me and looked fine.

Results of Pingdom's "Website Speed Test" on the URL:

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/2YiTc/http://www.theatlantic.co...

1.1 MB of that is JavaScript! And while it reports 3.69s load time, the waterfall shows that it actually took much longer than that. For example, a 497 byte resource on realtime.services.disqus.com (heh, "realtime") took just over 10 seconds!

I'm glad I use Ghostery.

There's a contingent of HN people reading this article who see nothing wrong at all and are now trying to figure out how to become the same thing themselves.

Yeah. Part of me cant help thinking he embodies the word "disrupt", or even, "innovate". Fine lines and all that.

I am one of those, not because I want to scam people, but because I make a legitimate product that receives lots of praise and even some press, and yet my sales are so near zero that I don't even bother remembering how much they are.

I don't like to dwell on writing style because that's not the focus of this community (plus, I'm far from perfect when it comes to writing), but I thought the author's overuse of descriptive words made this story hard to read:

"That Friday afternoon, resplendent in a lustrous violet button-down, William packed half a dozen friends into a private plane on a frosty Edmonton, Alberta, tarmac and jetted off to Las Vegas."

This was the second or third sentence. I was just getting into the flow of the story and felt bombarded by all that information. I could have waited to read about the color of the guy's shirt.

The Atlantic isn't quite as high browed as the New Yorker, but they're both literary magazines and so the prose style is somewhat to be expected. :P

(The Atlantic is one of my favorite magazines)

I appreciate your point. I'm also a big fan of The Atlantic and The New Yorker is my favorite magazine. :)

I think most of the magazines' authors write literary pieces without overusing descriptive words. To me adjectives and adverbs are the worst culprits in terms of slowing down readers. It's usually better to pack meaning into verbs.

For example, someone could write, "A tall attractive woman with bright shiny shoes approached the fat gentleman by the bar." Alternatively, he or she could write, "The woman sauntered toward the gentleman by the bar."

While the two sentences aren't equivalent in meaning, they paint a similar picture. The second sentence is better in my opinion because it keeps a certain flow going.

Stephen King wrote about this, referring to adverbs as "flat tires": http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/13/stephen-ki...

I think there are three clear parties that need to take more active steps to try to reign in these kinds of Shysters:

1) Google - Institute a "Reputation Rank"/or other algos. internally when selling Ads thru any platform. If there is some hint that an ad-buyer is into some questionable stuff yank their ads, ban them from buying any more. Have a dedicated staff that investigates fraud ads and make it simple for the customers to file complaints about specific ads.

2) Visa/MC/Amex - The central lynch-pin - if they cannot bill, they cannot cheat. Tune your systems to ban these shysters faster.

3) Govt. - Create a dedicated Agency to help consumers with Internet commerce related fraud complaints. The nature of Internet makes it a fundamentally different animal to conduct business on - you need a fundamentally different kind of dept. to help keep track of Fraud.

1) Indeed. Google today is kinda schizophrenic when it comes to this kind of policies: super strict rules about the content and the way it gets displayed in SERPs by google Search, totally non-chalant and pretty lax about Adwords campaigns that are borderline scammy. Sometimes they look like the totally separated departments of a dystopian government from the Future, à la Brazil.

2) Hard to do before an investigation takes place. Sure there are recognizable patterns but the easiest route is still to block and refund after the fraud has actually happened.

3) Well, more than that the Govts should spend their money on educating people to avoid this kind of scams

For #2 I think it would be nice to see greater availability of "virtual CC numbers", where you can set some arbitrary limit for and it is not exceeded.

It seems limited to a few banks that I choose not to be customers of though, so maybe the feature doesn't work as well as I hope it would.

I would certainly like to see better tools as a card owner, which I could use to better protect myself.

It's worth looking at this from multiple angles.

The human being in me says: "This behaviour is morally and ethically reprehensible, and should be illegal. He should be in jail because he's a con artist who defrauds people."

The idealist in me says: "This guy is preying on the weak and hurting people."

The ruthless entrepreneur in me says: "This guy is using a system that works, and it's producing real results".

The marketer and strategist in me says: "This guy is using a system that relies on intentionally ugly or shady ads to qualify out people who are capable of fighting back. He then gets their credit card number, and repeatedly makes a bunch of sketchy recurring charges that are nearly impossible to fight and/or cancel. What a genius system for making money. People can't fight something they don't know about or are unwilling to cancel."

From a purely objective standpoint his system works because it's based on an understanding of human behavior, psychology and emotion. He knows how to create ads that get clicked, and how to get people to enter their credit card numbers and agree to charges.

We would do well to learn how to get past emotions like disgust and flip around the perspective here. How can we apply some of his strategies and tactics in ways that are morally and ethically sound to our own legitimate ventures?

Here are the insights I gained from the article:

* There is a HUGE traffic opportunity with ads and ad networks, and it's highly scalable * Focus on areas of high existing search demand * If you can convert, you can really crank up the paid traffic engine * If you generate the most revenue in your niche you'll win the advertising game because you can pay the most for traffic * Upsell to a bunch of small recurring charges that are bite-sized so they don't seem like much, but they add up to a lot over time

From a purely analytical and objective standpoint you gotta hand it to the guy for his execution.

This a seems a clear advantage for bitcoin - scammy businesses don't have access to your account to continue charging you (unlike credit cards).

Sure, you can't do the initial chargeback but the main issue here was with the recurring charges.

Also bitcoin preventing chargebacks eliminates fraud for the retailer.

On a side issue, that kind of sucks too, subscriptions are cool, let's see how they get implemented over bitcoin.

Probably you could authorize your wallet holder to deduct a certanin amount each month.

Chargeback and subscription can be done using bitcoin scripting, that is part of the protocol.

I find it unreal to read about a professional conman having his scam advertised on Google shortly after the Rap Genius incident. Clearly Google has interesting priorities.

It seems like a number of problems (erosion of privacy, abuse of advertising channels, etc) would cease to exist if users were charged some small sum for the use of Web services that are now ad-supported.

As someone who's utterly naive when it comes to building a Web property, I'd like to understand why this idea is bad/hard/crazy. What is a typical set of eyeballs really worth on a high-traffic site? Are paywalls the kiss of death?

How would those web services attract users without placing ads on other sites?

If the terms are listed, and the user states they read and agree to the terms, it is not fraud. Feeling regret does not equate to fraud.

If the terms were made available before purchase, and the user was made to agree to the terms, then I do not see what fraud took place. If people want to agree to contracts they don't read, then there's not much anyone can do about that...

If someone did not think there would be recurring charges, then they did not read the terms they took responsibility for reading and that they stated they read and agreed to.

Either people knew about the recurring charges and agreed... or they stated that they read the terms they actually didn't read and agree to them.

The real problem here, if there is one at all, is that people agree to terms they don't bother reading.

Something is deeply wrong with the world in which a scammer who spams and exploits idiots and then over-charge their cards, the way porn industry does for ages, is portrayed as a new hero.

Where did you see him being portrayed as a hero?

Sounds like a opportunity for the NSA -- who should be aware of all of this -- to close them down and gain some credibility.

I wonder if the ever-vigilant FTC has noticed anything shady about what Wall Street has been doing for years now.

Finally a post that warrants the most overused of HN accusations: SNAKE OIL! ;)

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