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Comment by justboxing | Hacker News Reader

"Instead, it alleges that at least twenty Amazon Local employees signed up for their Angie’s List, some using fake names, and used the information about providers on Angie’s List to approach their competitor’s top rated providers for listings on Amazon Local."

How could Angie's List possibly prove that Amazon Local employees signed up for their service using fake names? If they use IP logs coming from Amazon, that doesn't mean anything, because Amazon employees may be signing up for Angie's List for their own personal reasons, correct?

What am I missing?? Does Angie's List have a strong case here or naw?

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Maybe they used the equivalent of a trap street[1], creating fake providers to catch scrapers? If Amazon had them in their service, it'd be pretty damning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

So you're proposing that amazon didn't bother to check that the provider was real before listing it on their website? I just don't see amazon blindly adding service providers to their website without any sort of vetting process.

They shouldn't be, they contacted us a Nissan and Infiniti auto and wanted us to sign up. Basically they would take a large percentage off of the top for service items (e.g.: Brake job, Turbo kits install, oil change.) We decided not to because we would have to raise cost to make the same profit.

Well, otherwise Angie's List could have put phone/fax numbers and email addresses owned by them in the contact info of the "trap providers", and so they'd have the records of those attempts by Amazon to check the provider.

>If they use IP logs coming from Amazon, that doesn't mean anything, because Amazon employees may be signing up for Angie's List for their own personal reasons, correct?

According to the lawsuit, Amazon employees were soliciting businesses using the Angie's List messaging feature.

I haven't used Angie's List- but its possible that the 3rd party providers that Angie lists could have told Angie that they are getting unwarranted solicitation.

Did you read the court document? Amazon employees signed up, sometimes with fake addresses and then immediately began running wide ranging searches across numerous categories in completely separate areas across the country from their primary residence. Jumping from searching on roofers to dentistry to day spas and everything in between. They have some cases where the Amazon employee even used Angie's List internal messaging system to send service providers messages asking them to run promotions on Amazon Local or to talk to them about business deals. It's the commercial aspect that is forbidden in the TOS.

They have all the search histories of all of these accounts, the titles of the employees at Amazon, their home addresses, etc. It's clear what they were doing, the question is will a judge see it as a pattern attempting to defraud Angie's List and were the employees directed to do this or did they do it on their own.

> If they use IP logs coming from Amazon, that doesn't mean anything, because Amazon employees may be signing up for Angie's List for their own personal reasons, correct?

I don't think this is right. If you're doing it using company resources (the Amazon network/IP), a legal argument could possibly be made that you're doing it on behalf of the company.

Maybe Amazon email addresses or CC's belonging to employees of Amazon? Not clear how they detected the breach...

> Maybe Amazon email addresses

Even if a user registered with an Amazon email address, what does that prove? That an Amazon employee used Angie's List?

As justboxing mentioned, it's completely possible that it was used by Amazon employees for personal use.

> CC's belonging to employees of Amazon

I want to say that's really unlikely. That would mean that there's a database of credit card numbers associated with their owner's employer, which would be troubling on multiple levels.

That's why civil discovery is a thing.

Maybe so. But then there's a difference between a reasonable suspicion and a fishing expedition against a competitor. Will be interesting to see how this pans out.

Would it be possible to JOIN a LinkedIn scrape against a day's ledger of receipts, or sign up log?

> I want to say that's really unlikely. That would mean that there's a database of credit card numbers associated with their owner's employer, which would be troubling on multiple levels.

Sounds like something Acxiom (http://www.acxiom.com/) would likely have.

Keep in mind that there are a lot of lawsuits that are done for strategic reasons, even where the factual grounding isn't super strong. I'm not saying that's necessarily happening here, but it could be the case.

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