The Mouth of Truth

Bocca della Verità is situated in the atrium of St. Mary's in Cosmedin church in Rome. According to popular belief it was said that anyone putting his hand in this mouth and swearing falsely, could not withdraw it. Little known other ‘mouths of truth’ are in Florence and they were used for, some would say, less romantic services.

They were carved lions heads with a gaping mouth and were used by the local government for citizens to leave notes accusing fellow citizens of a crime. It is believed that Leonardo da Vinci was arrested on homosexual charges because of an accusation placed in one of these heads. The idea was that an accuser should put his name on the sheet of paper and his accusations, if the accusation turned out to be false the accuser would suffer punishment.

Of course the accuser often did not put his name or inscribed his note with a false name. Nevertheless, if it suited the authorities of the time, the accused could suffer harsh penalties for his crimes. Da Vinci escaped execution (the penalty for homosexuality in those days) because the father of his ‘friend’ was a high powered nobleman. Da Vinci was let off with a ‘light beating’.

So here we have a 14th century medium where anonymous accusers can post a note accusing a fellow citizen of crimes for which he has little chance of rebutting, even if he does, his reputation is now lost in the mire of public opinion and the ‘no smoke without fire’ attitude. However, if he is rich and powerful the consequences can be dulled. Can you see where this is going?

Of course society progressed, the law made sure that you had the right to face your accuser in a court of law where you could defend your honor and your reputation. Then some guy invented the Internet and we made a technological leap into cyberspace. Unfortunately, at the same time, the Bocca Della Verita went global.

On early Internet boards you used to post your actual name, I remember I used to do it, you would chat with you friends, colleagues, the whole world if you wanted. It was a blissfully innocent time, then something changed, things became just a little bit more sinister. Viruses, spam, and scams, the net had mutated to mirror real life, only with the added bonus for the criminal of near total anonymity. You can bet your bottom dollar that that the first person to use a ‘nom de plume’ on the web was someone just about to defame someone else, or attempt to rip them off.

Suddenly we were back in the 14th century only this time we would not be dragged in front of a local authority and beaten or fined, we would be subject to being pilloried by competitors or rivals.

Take the case of Sue Scheff, who runs a small educational business in Weston, Florida. She filed a lawsuit in 2003 claiming she had been subjected to 10 months of ugly criticism on the internet from Carey Bock. Ms Bock, from Mandeville,Louisiana, had posted the comments on Fornits.com, a board used by parents of troubled teenagers.

A jury in Florida awarded Mrs Scheff $11.3m (£6m) in costs and damages after the former acquaintance Carey Bock accused her of being a crook, a con artist and a fraudster on an internet talkboard. The award, believed to be the largest verdict of it sort relating to individual postings on bulletin boards or blogs, was handed down by a jury. The sum included $5m (£2.7m) in punitive damages.

With almost two new blogs created every second, and 1.6m postings each day the mass of unmediated comment from individuals is changing the face of media law. "This is a growing trend because of the exponential growth in the number of people publishing on the internet who do not have the training or oversight of traditional hardcopy publishers," said Dave Heller, a lawyer with the New York-based Media Law Resource Center which monitors legal actions arising from the web.

Craig Delsack, a media lawyer in Manhattan, said that many bloggers were publishing first, thinking later: "People are thinking they can say what they want but they don't realise the long-lasting implications of what they write and that they can be held accountable. Posting is not like having a conversation in the bedroom with your boyfriend.

The Florida case arose after Ms Scheff helped Ms Bock remove her children from a special school in Costa Rica. She says Ms Bock grew belligerent after she refused to give her confidential information for a documentary she was working on.

Ms Scheff says she is still paying off the legal fees and accepts she will get little of the $11m. "But this award is vindication. I hope it does make people think twice about what they post on the internet. When people post they are writing from emotion, and it can be very damaging".

Mrs Bock may have been an angry law abiding citizen who just got carried away, we don’t know, but what if your accuser has something else in mind, something far more sinister than vengeance for a supposed slight, what if the Mouth of Truth has been hijacked for commercial purposes.

The ‘industry’ of threatening or using libel has been around for many years, only it was called blackmail. Basically, the blackmailer says “I will tell someone what you don’t want them to know unless you pay me $X”. The perpetrator, however, had to be very careful that he or she didn’t make a mistake and trap themselves into getting found out. Imagine if you were of the criminal persuasion and you knew you could get away with blackmail most of the time because you are protected by free speech laws? Cue Anarchy.

If certain legal cases are to be believed, the practice is going on right now, although it has not reached a level of sophistication that has given it massive exposure. How does it work? Allow me to explain:

The Con - The scamster sets up a web site dedicated to unearthing scams. He can remain anonymous because he says he does not want to deal with retribution from criminals for revealing their scams. He can also claim the essential air of respectability because he runs a crusading site. If evidence on the web is to be believed some of these scam busting sites are run by convicted felons who can say they have turned over a new leaf and are protecting others from people like themselves. The set up is perfect and probably adheres to the scamsters rulebook, which is no doubt available on the web somewhere.

The genius of this is that the scamster will, inevitably, get scams that are genuinely posted on his site, people will see this, not deal with the company and hail the site owner as a hero, thus perpetuating his crusader image. So how is the scamster supposed to make money? There are three ways, the obvious one is posting Google adwords all over your site, the second is asking for ‘donations’ to keep the site free, the third, is extortion

The Mark- As a budding internet scambusting scamster you will need a ‘Mark’. Usually an ‘offline’ scamster will research his Mark very well. Knowing his weaknesses and his strengths he will create a scam off the back of them. Blackmail for the adulterer, identity fraud for the careless etc. In the pre-Internet days selecting this Mark was known as an art form in itself according to the many books dedicated to the subject. The Internet, however, has made this a whole lot easier, our scam site scamster is in a league of his own, his Marks are delivered to him on a plate.

I think you would agree that JP Morgan is a trustworthy banking organisation with many years of history, a first class pedigree and about as far away from a scam as you could get. Put JP Morgan AND Scam in Google and you get 271,000 pages. Some may be scams against JP Morgan others are accusing JP Morgan of some sort of scam. I imagine that anyone who would accuse JP Morgan of a scam would receive a barrage of letters from the highest paid and most vicious lawyers on the planet, so our Internet scamster would do well to steer well clear of such a well thought of, and well protected, firm. What if, however, you are a smaller company, who has spent lost of cash on developing your web site and your reputation but couldn’t afford JP Morgans’ flesh eating lawyers? What if someone were to put your name in Google and a scam site was the first thing that came up, what then?

The Sting – A genuinely aggrieved client, an ex employee, a jilted lover or just someone jealous of your company’s’ success, any of these are lurking waiting get their revenge, so they post something, anonymously of course, on a scam web site. You send an email to the site administrator protesting your innocence and he promptly posts your email on the web, making you look like you are trying to bully our scam crusader. The pages on the web are now there for all to see, anyone who you have slighted in business, upset in your local bar or, more likely, someone who is in competition with you, can find your name and perpetuate the bad press about your company, even if you have done nothing wrong. All this in total anonymity.

The Pay Off - Simple, our scamster knows that you will have to spend at least $5000 to get a lawyer to start the process to get him to take down the malicious posts, you will also have to provide evidence to counter complaints that don’t actually exist and you will have to take time to sort the whole issue out. By this time you are getting emails from clients, you may even have lost some business, all you want to do is to get those posts off the web. Then you get an email.

“Dear Mr CEO. I am the administrator of scamsareus.com. From the posts that have appeared on our web site you seem to be having some problems with your client base and have received very poor publicity from posters on our site.

I appreciate that you may want to resolve the situation as quickly as possible so perhaps we could make a suggestion. We will follow up the complaints that have been made on our site on your behalf and attempt to placate these clients to where we feel that there has been a satisfactory resolution. At this point we would be happy to remove the posts from our web site.”

Although you don’t think that there have been any legitimate complaints because no one has contacted your company, you nevertheless think this would be a least a way of getting the posts removed. You write to the administrator saying this would be a good idea and you get a response.

"Dear Mr CEO. Thank you for your mail and I am happy that you value your clients and reputation so highly that you are willing to deal with the situation head-on. When this issue has been resolved this will look very favourable for your company as we will be happy to post that you have been so cooperative and pro active.

We believe that we can resolve these issues to your satisfaction but this will take some time and effort on our part where we will not be able to give full attention to our company. In order that we are compensated for this we will charge a fee of $10,000 payable directly to our account.

We hope you feel this is reasonable for all the time and effort we will be expending to help you regain your reputation with these clients. Clearly if this type of complaint cannot be resolved your company would suffer much greater losses."

There you have it. A brazen request for money to remove these posts wrapped up in a threat of further problems. Not the veiled threats of yesteryear and the skulking in doorways waiting to pay off a blackmailer, a straight up front threat to ruin your business if you do not pay.

So what do you do? If you call your lawyer you are going to pay $5,000 and risk antagonizing the scam site and getting worse publicly. For an extra $5,000 you can make it all go away. You are a risk taker, that is why you own a business and you can calculate the risk reward, so you feel that you will probably spend more on lawyers to get nothing, so you pay. The posts are removed and you get on with you life. That is, until the next time because you have been marked as a ‘payer’.

There we have it, the perfect scam. How much did it cost the scamster? Nothing, input “free bulletin boards” in Google and you get 31,200 pages or put in ‘free forums’ and you get over 8,000,000 pages. It is easy to set up one of these sites. We know, because we did it in ten minutes. We set up http://z6.invisionfree.com/Scamfraudalert2 (OK not the sexiest name but it was free!) to gather research on these sites. As of writing we have no members however we suspect that we may get some research material from those who have been contacted by the scam board scam artists, we suspect that we will get our fair share of people standing up for the ‘reformed felons’ too. This will make for some interesting future articles at least.

The above example of how extortion may be perpetrated is an extreme one and the emails made up by ourselves, but it is an accusation that appears on many sites and in a number of law suits.

Once a scam site is popular enough,however, it does not need even need to stretch to these kind of practices. Some estimate that scam sites make up to $50,000 per month from Google adsense revenue and the kind of adverts that are on the site

My World Plus Scam Don't Even Think Of Joining Without Reading This First  

We make no judgment on the above sites but do your own research and come to your own conclusions, but we smell something a little odd when “I Can Make You Rich’ redirects you to a site that has such gems as “The Rich Jerk” which is then mentioned as a scam on the very same scam site… http://www.scam.com/showthread.php?t=16943.

Does this strike you as ironic? If you were running a scam site that really wanted to protect the public, would you have links to sites that your site highlights as scams? Or would you continue to take your 30 pieces of Google silver? I am sure by this stage in the article you are wondering whether the above is a plausible situation. With the litigious nature of the US and the ambulance chaser mentality of some law firms, you would have thought that taking defamation cases to court would be a lucrative business. It appears that this in an area were even lawyers are afraid to tread en mass.

Take the case of Les Henderson, outwardly a scam crusader with titles under his belt of “Crimes of Persuasion” and “Under Investigation”, the latter taking on Lou Pearlman of NSYNC management fame and the way the Florida AG Charlie Crist's office handled the Wilhelmina Scouting Network (WSN) affair. However he is also allegedly the is the owner of scamfraudalert.com and other web sites, he also allegedly goes under the name of ‘scrub’ as an editor on scam.com mentioned above.  

The site came to our notice when we trawling the web for research. A number of companies on the site have complained and had personal mails posted, so we emailed them to hear their stories.

This led us on a fascinating path to discover whether some of these scam sites are a front for activity that is lees than altruistic. According to reports on the web (http://www.easybackgroundchecked.com/leshendersonscam.html) Les Henderson was allegedly convicted in California for shoplifting in 1993 and in 1998 was allegedly convicted of selling stolen goods.

This may be hearsay and completely untrue but we have found no denials for all the times it has been claimed. It is clear, though, that all that is on scamfraudalert is not fully researched, ‘scrub’, the administrator, even admits on the site "I don't know all these companies are frauds. I do know the pattern that most follow and based on those patterns, we can conclude that their motives are fraudulent.” This administrator seems to have made himself, Judge, jury and executioner.

There have been some companies that have responded with rebuttals but the modus operandi seems to be that the site will post the email address of the person sending rebuttals to the site and be pilloried for his troubles. Those that have fought back have received a barrage of abuse, many people assume that if the site is attacked, free speech itself is being attacked, and take as read that if a company appears on the site it must be a scam.

A man such as Mr Henderson who has created an image for himself as a serious investigator of scams seems an unlikely person to be publishing incorrect articles, however, there are a number of court cases that have or are being brought against scam site owners and Mr Henderson himself. We have not made a judgment on whether or not these cases have any merit but one would assume that you would not go to court if you were actually perpetrating a fraud.

What if does get to court? Who do you sue? The scamfraudalert site has a post which says “We are not the web police nor do we make any claim to be just that. What we are all about is security and helping the helpless. Trying to put a face on those who sit behind computers with the sole purpose of committing crimes”, and yet Mr Henderson the alleged owner, apparently lives in Canada behind a string of postal boxes (because of the potential threats from those he exposes..hmmm.) and the scamfraudalert site also carries the same Google advert leading to “The Rich Jerk” that is also highlighted as a scam on the site. Anyone who knows Adsense will also know that these sites could be filtered out.

There are many fine investigative reporters who uncover fraud on an International scale and do not feel the need to hide behind anything other than well researched, concise and finely worded articles.

Do I know that all the scam sites are fronts for nefarious activities? No I don’t but I do know the pattern that most follow and based on those patterns, we can conclude that their motives are..well, the kind may say ‘misguided’.

Sites that have the genuine intention of protecting us should be applauded , but we abhor the practice of so-called public crusaders masking poorly researched stories, with the outward veneer of helping us out and protecting themselves from the consequences by hijacking well intentioned laws, while at the same time making money from the very scams they purport to expose. The words ‘Vicious’ and “Circle’ come to mind.

Our conclusion is the saying "Beware a vested interest masquerading as moral indignation" could have been an original commandment in the rules of engagement for those reading certain scam boards