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Report: #467997

Complaint Review: A Harrison Barnes -ShortTask -Employmentcrossing, Lawcrossing, Legal Authority, Employment Authority - Pasadena California

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  • Reported By: Santa Monica California
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  • A Harrison Barnes -ShortTask -Employmentcrossing, Lawcrossing, Legal Authority, Employment Authority www.shorttask.com Pasadena, California U.S.A.

A Harrison Barnes, ShortTask, Employmentcrossing, Lawcrossing, Legal Authority, Employment Authority, Vanara, BCG Attorney Search, JDJournal Scamster A. Harrison Barnes Strikes Again By Creating a Website to Pay People to Manipulate Blogs and SEO Rankings for His Companies Hound, Vanara, Employmentcrossing and all of the other Crossings, Legal Authority, Lawcrossing, Employment Authority, BCG Attorney Search, EdFed, Law Firm Staff, JDJournal and Preferred Resumes Pasadena California

*Consumer Comment: More Proof That A. Harrison Barnes Resorts to Deceptive and Fraudulent Consumer Tactics!!

*Consumer Comment: A Harrison Barnes Shoes How He Opaerates BCG, Lawcrossing, Hound, Vanara, EmploymentCrossing Through Shorttask

*Author of original report: A. Harrison Barns, Shorttask, Lawcrossing, etc. and His Internet Scams: All Lawyers Beware

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A Harrison Barnes is at it again with another pathetic and slimy operation. He copied almost exactly Amazon's mTurk site to create a site called shorttask.com. A Harrison Barnes pitches the site as a great way to work from home. In reality most, if not all, of the supposed 60,000 tasks (most pay only a few cents) are solicitations for third parties to manipulate web postings and links to promote his other nefarious sites. For example, here is one task from this new company:

Find an article about jobs in Contract Management and comment that contractmanagementcrossing.com is a good source of jobs because it only shows you jobs from employer websites and every other job board out there. Please insure that you link to www.contractmanagementCROSSING.com and that you refer to the fact that the site has more jobs than any other website. Please refer to the fact that this is a good way to track down jobs because these jobs are often not advertised. Please insure your posting is at least 30 words long and is not too spammy. PLEASE MAKE SURE YOUR POSTING IS ON A MAJOR PUBLICATION THAT IS RECENT. We need to be able to see your link to pay you for it. Please also provide us the link to your posting. PLEASE MAKE SURE YOUR POSTING IS ON A MAJOR PUBLICATION THAT IS RECENT. We need to be able to see your link to pay you for it. Please also provide us the link to your posting. This must be a NEWS PUBLICATION and not a publication such as Ehow, Ezine articles, etc. Examples of news publications are the New York Times, Denver Post, Wall Street Journal and similar publications. A niche publication in this industry is also ok. Please also insure that you create hyperlinks pointing towards www.contractmanagementCROSSING.com using the following terms:

contract manager salary
contract manager responsibilities
contract manager jobs
contract manager careers
contract management resume
contract management recruiters

A Harrison Barnes estimates that this will require one hour of effort and offers just 75 cents to complete the task.

Another task requests the worker to Please bookmark this site: www.ComplianceCROSSING.com on www.clipclip.org. Provide the exact url where site is added. For that he pays 5 cents for an estimated 15 minutes of work.

What does this mean? Well, A Harrison Barnes has blown all of his credibility by paying people to create artificial feedback about his sites leading at least me to mistrust any and all positive posts about any of his companies. It also means that there are probably legions of innocent sites being manipulated by these disingenuous posts.

It also leads me to believe the sweat shop claim by Joe C in a different thred on this RipOffReport Site. If A Harrison Barnes will only pay between 20 and 75 cents an hour then we're talking about slave (or "sweat shop") wages (a search on the site revealed that out of the 60,000 tasks only 4 paid more than $1 and those were three hour tasks). In the video on his site A Harrison Barnes just mentions in passing that there is no payout until a worker's account equals $50. Allowing for a generous average of 50 cents per hour, a person would have to work about 2 40 hour work weeks just to qualify for a $50 payout. Even if someone completes a task, A. Harrison Barnes reserves the right to reject the work allowing him to avoid people reaching the $50 mark (although there is no evidence to support this but it wouldn't surprise me). I would ask if any readers has ever actually been paid but there is no way that I can trust that a person answering in the affirmative wasn't paid by A. Harrison Barnes to answer that question.

Because most of this is also intended to raise his SEO ratings in violation of SEO policies, including GOOGLE, those sites should seriously consider removing all of his companies from their search engines. In the meantime, the rest of you with websites should be very wary of positive posts or cross links related to A. Harrison Barnes' many sites.

Kelly
Santa Monica, California
U.S.A.

This report was posted on Ripoff Report on 07/09/2009 03:40 PM and is a permanent record located here: https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/a-harrison-barnes-shorttask-employmentcrossing-lawcrossing-legal-authority-employment-authority/pasadena-california-91101/a-harrison-barnes-shorttask-employmentcrossing-lawcrossing-legal-authority-employment-467997. The posting time indicated is Arizona local time. Arizona does not observe daylight savings so the post time may be Mountain or Pacific depending on the time of year. Ripoff Report has an exclusive license to this report. It may not be copied without the written permission of Ripoff Report. READ: Foreign websites steal our content

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#3 Consumer Comment

More Proof That A. Harrison Barnes Resorts to Deceptive and Fraudulent Consumer Tactics!!

AUTHOR: MOMO - (USA)

POSTED: Wednesday, October 07, 2009

The FTC today finally ruled that blogsters who are paid to post reviews on products or services must now disclose the fact they were paid or face penalties up to $11,000 per infraction. This action by the FTC formalizes its long-standing belief that a lack of such disclosure violates consumer protection laws because such blog comments amount to undisclosed paid endorsements amounting to fraudulent and deceptive advertising.


The first indication that A. Harrison Barnes either paid people to post positive comments about his companies or asked people to post positive comments even if they were unfamiliar with the service first surfaced in 2008 in a blog posting by Cathy Gellis who confirmed that Mr. Barnes manipulated Amazon's mTurk service to enlist individuals to "plant" false positive comments about Barnes's companies. Ms. Gellis worked with Amazon to effectively bar Barnes from further use of mTurk. Since that time, scores of other similar incidents appeared on other websites.


In response to having been caught in his deceptive practices, A. Harrison Barnes then launched a virtual carbon copy of mTurk called Shorttask and used this site to pay thousands of people to plant comments and links that would make his companies appear to be much more effective, positive and favorable than the general view of other more reputable sites. Shorttask has been widely criticized as a deceptive and manipulative tactic to counter the rising tide of complaints against both he and his companies. (It should be noted that during the same period Barnes decided to sue individuals who posted negative comments about both he and his companies claiming $10 million in damages).


The latest move by the FTC merely formalizes what people have long known - that A. Harrison Barnes is willing to engage in questionabe, and probably illegal, consumer tactics to mislead the public as to the nature and poor quality of his companies and their services.


NYT Article: [www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/10/05/technology/AP-US-TEC-Bloggers-FTC.html]


FTC Statement: [www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm]

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#2 Consumer Comment

A Harrison Barnes Shoes How He Opaerates BCG, Lawcrossing, Hound, Vanara, EmploymentCrossing Through Shorttask

AUTHOR: Watchingu - (U.S.A.)

POSTED: Monday, July 27, 2009

Does anyone want to know how Harrison Barnes goyt your contact information/ Just look at Shorttask.com. For $5.00, using the name Dwayne Smith, Harrison Barnes asked people to scour the web for resumes from free web sites in any of a number of categories from sales to law, from construction to accounting. Then he repackages these contacts and SPAMS everyone to subscribe for his $30/month service. All-in-all, he offers about a total $100-$250 through 20 somewhat odd tasks to increase his SPAM list by 500-1000 names. If he gets just 3-4 unspespecting, unemployed unguarded souls to subscribe at $30/month he already recouped his investment and everything above that is profit.

The people who sign up for these services that are near impossible to cancel and have led to coutless complaints with the BB, credit card companies, attorney generals and on-line complaints, never realized that all of his companies get their information through free sources. None of his companies have any special arrangements with any employer or any special technology aside from crappy web-crawleres desgned by cheap labor in India.

This is a scam because it deceives the job-hunters ito believing that they are paying for the largest service of its type in the world. What garbage, but it obviously works because he seems to be living a lifestyle at the top 1% in the country. This while the country and people who sign up for the assistance of his companies suffer through the worst economy of their lives.

Harrison Barnes and all of his companies should be investigated and either disciplined or shut down.

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#1 Author of original report

A. Harrison Barns, Shorttask, Lawcrossing, etc. and His Internet Scams: All Lawyers Beware

AUTHOR: Kelly - (U.S.A.)

POSTED: Saturday, July 18, 2009

One would think that A. Harrison Barnes would tone down his attempts to manipulate the legal employment community after all of the outrage that he generated. Yet A. Harrison Barnes has turned up his scamming and spamming with Shorttask. He just recently had the following task listed on his Shorttask web-site:

"Instructions: - Using different Resumes Sites, Search Engines and Find 40 Authentic Resumes which are modified in last 30 days from Legal Category with J.D, LLB, Law or LLM degree as Education Field. like- Associate Attorney, Attorney, General Counsel, Litigation Attorney, etc...
- Person Email address is mandatory field.
- Find out only US locations resumes.
- J.D, LLB, Law or LLM degree is must in candidates resumes
- If you are not able to find the Person email address and we could find it for the same your task would be rejected. so research well for all required fields to get paid.
- You have to find out also the relevant information like First Name, Middle Name, Last Name, City, State, Zip Code and Person Title in the format mentioned.
- Provide data in following CSV or Microsoft Excel or Word format: Column A(First Name) , Column B(Middle Name), Column C(Last Name), Column D(City), Column E(State), Column F(Zip Code), Column G(Person Email), Column H(Person Title), Column I(Source Link - Link from where the resumes are taken.)
- Please provide the exact link from where the resumes are taken.
- Find out the required Contact Details."

So if an attorney has a resume online that is not in A. Harrison Barnes's database, A. Harrison Barnes is offering $1.25/hour for people to get him the background and mandatory e-mail addresses of all U.S. attorneys.

Lawyers beware. Even if you never signed up for any of A. Harrison Barnes's services or even heard of his schemes, you might end up on a SPAM e-mail list in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act and other laws.

Should any attorney receive unsolicited e-mails from any of A. Harrison Barness companies you should report the SPAM to both legal and Internet monitoring agencies. The e-mails might be sogned by A. Harrison Barnes, Carleen Trapp, John Simpson, or any other name he wants to invent.

This abuse by a lawyer, of lawyers, must stop.

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