These guys aren't doing anything "unconstitutional" or violative of your civil rights. Nor does it appear as though they are doing anything illegal.
All they do, from what I can tell, is the following:
1) Take advantage of the way a search engine like Google works to shove individual Rip Off Reports links to lower pages. Google, at least in its infancy, based search result relevancy on the number of outside sites that linked to a given page.
Take a company like Amway. There are probably thousands of web pages out there containing complaints against Amway. Many of these pages contain links to reports on this site. With a large volume of external links to a given Rip Off Report, that report will rank high in a Google search. So if you google "Amway," one of the first sites listed would, theoretically, be a rip off report.
It turns out that Amway is a bad example because there are SO many sites dedicated solely to the scam.
But what this company would do for Amway would be to create numerous, largely duplicative "dummy" websites containing positive information about Amway. Each of these sites would link to every other such site, and links to these sites would also be placed in other "dummy" sites.
So with all of these links to fictitious sites containing positive information about the reported company, the RoR link falls behind three or four pages worth of dummy sites, rather than being one of the first links a searcher would see.
2) With some other sites that may post negative information about ripoff companies, this company uses the threat of defamation lawsuits.
3) In other instances, this company will "troll" sites like RoR and post fictitious rebuttals.
So I don't like what they're doing, but it's just a business. And it's actually based in a very marketable concept if you ask me. From the previous rebuttal, it doesn't sound like they're all that capable of living up to their promises anymore, and their prices are just absurd.
So think about it this way: some company scams a consumer and winds up on the wrong end of a RipOff report. Now, when someone goes to do some research on the company, one of the first things they see is a link to the report. To fix this problem, they shell out thousands of dollars to a company that, lo and behold, can't follow through on its promises, and the RipOff Report is still listed high.
Karma!
Why file a report here? Ripoff Report is a permanent record! Other complaint sites copy our content then remove reports for money.
