
A man who spent $100K to remove a lie from Google - Fins
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2018/04/03/598239092/the-man-who-spent-100k-to-remove-a-lie-from-google
======
CaliforniaKarl
Some background behind the comment I’m about to make: I was born in Ohio and
lived in the state until, after graduating from OSU, I moved to Newport Beach
(Orange County, California) for work. I only moved to the Bay Area because I
didn’t get a startup-style job, although I respect the people who work in
startups; I definitely wouldn’t be able to keep up.

I have become extremely concerned that many people who work in the Bay Area—or
who work for companies based in the Bay Area—have, in the large, forgotten
that their users are fellow human beings. I am turning more and more to the
belief that _everyone_ in a company needs to have some unfiltered interaction
with the company’s users on a regular basis.

Separating out the support process (to automation, to contractors, etc.) makes
it easy to forget you’re not writing code to serve robots, you’re writing code
to serve people.

~~~
senorjazz
The first job I had made all devs do at least 2 1/2 days of support every
week. We all hated it, but I can see now how it kept us in contact with the
customers. Of the issues / bugs they faced.

Now, I run my own (small) company and make sure I (and everyone else) does at
_least_ 2 1/2 days of support.

Support contact is not hidden away, we don't try and put up hurdle after
hurdle to contact someone. You can contact us on any medium and is easy(ish)
to be escalated to someone who can solve the problem, explain the issue.

Time and time again, customers state our support reputation was the reason why
they purchased with us instead of other companies (even though a majority of
them never actually get in contact with us)

~~~
jacquesm
2 1/2 days sounds like it is on the high side of what is useful and will be
super expensive if you pay your devs what they are worth (which makes me
suspect that you don't!).

Developers should definitely stay in touch with the end users and I'm a big
fan of the principle, when camarades.com was still a thing we did something
like this but on a much smaller fraction of the time.

Which helped in another aspect as well: if you get hired as a developer but
you end up doing support half the time you will likely be looking to leave for
a company where your job title matches the work that you do.

~~~
tremon
I suspect the GP meant two shifts of four hours, not 2.5 days. The latter
seems excessive indeed.

~~~
jacquesm
Ah good one, I never saw that possibility, yes, that is likely the accurate
reading. It looks like I wasn't the only one reading it like that either.
Would be good for the GGP to confirm which one is the correct reading.

------
merb
> In fact, even after Google stopped listing the defamatory site, the search
> page added a disclaimer — in red letters — that Ervine's results had been
> altered

well the search results ARE altered. google actually needs to save more data
to hide a search result. it's silly that people attack google instead of the
source. also if a single website tells a lie about somebody it's probably not
a good source since a SINGLE website is never a good source. In european the
cases were different and that's why I think "the right to be forgotten" is a
dumb idea. actually official media outlets and newspapers had an article
published about a guy who did something bad 15 years ago. written letters that
is protected by most european law. however the guy didn't want that his bad
history will be revelead so he sued. from than on everything started.

here are my problems with the whole:

* he actually WAS an bad actor in the past, so it's still hard to trust somebody * it's actually easier to restore trust by having a bad and a good article publish (i.e. if people change you could maybe find some writes who writes good things about you) * hiding search results won't hide the truth, it just makes it harder to access, which basically means nothing is forgotten it's just harder to find, how bad people were in the past

actually there is a lot of stuff why the current system is bad.

~~~
bkor
> he actually WAS an bad actor in the past, so it's still hard to trust
> somebody

If you don't forgive/forget, there is no incentive for the person to behave
differently. E.g. if someone once was involved with the police and as a result
cannot get any proper job anymore, how would this individual ever change?

Some countries seem to focused on punishing people for the rest of their
lives. This sometimes under the assumption that people actually consider the
impact of their actions before do it.

Further, if a person is considered to be/treated as a criminal all the time
then eventually they'll just behave as one.

~~~
spacehunt
Since when did forget become acceptable? Do we just remove eg. the holocaust
from history books now?

~~~
neolefty
Yes, forgetting is sometimes inappropriate, but not every crime is the
Holocaust.

It's the norm in cases involving childhood offenses, for example—expunging
one's juvenile record—and it's the reason for statutes of limitations.

------
jon_richards
Personal feelings aside, I think this is quite indicative of European and the
US values. The US generally values the freedom _to_ , while Europe values
freedom _from_. Things obviously get more complicated when multiple parties
are in play, but those seem like the fundamental properties on which the laws
are built.

~~~
doe88
Yes this is a main difference between US and Europe, in the US there is a
strong first amendment, in Europe there is no such thing, many of these
countries have strong defamation and hate speech laws, as well as in this case
the european law of _right to be forgotten_. Im European but Im envious of the
first amendment, for all its faults I think it's better.

~~~
userbinator
The "right to be forgotten" just seems far too close to "right to rewrite
history", which is greatly disturbing.

To borrow computer science terminology, I think "history should be append-
only."

~~~
ubernostrum
The US has the right to be forgotten. It's just expressed through contracts
(settlement non-disclosure agreements, mandatory arbitration clauses, etc.)
instead of through a general law granting the right, and is only available to
those with the resources to force others into such contracts.

~~~
lmkg
There is also such a thing as having a record expunged. That is non-
contractual, although still more available to people with resources to
navigate the legal system.

------
jaytaylor
Surprise surprise, he's the founder of a company selling a service to help
people erase shit from google.

Not Quite A Classic Submarine Article (thank you for the correction,
thisisit!). Just an overt marketing piece in this case.

Way to go NPR.. doing the tough journalism, really pounding the pavement here.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

~~~
fwdpropaganda
I would guess most people on HN know about this PR technique, no need to point
it out every time you see it.

For myself I enjoyed the article. I didn't know the right to be forgotten
wasn't in place in the US.

~~~
verylittlemeat
It should be pointed out every time to the point where HN should even include
a tag on articles that are confirmed PR.

Allowing these "advertisement as a story" posts to stand may already be
normalized but it doesn't have to continue to be.

~~~
fwdpropaganda
I agree that you have a point.

But on the other hand, the cynical in me says that in a sense all articles are
like that. Part of these articles are a plug for some startup's PR, part are a
techie writing about his hobby because that builds his name and maybe lands
him a client, part are big newspapers that need the traffic to sell
advertising, some authors write because they want to push their ideological
point of view, firms write about the latest bug because they sell security
services and expect to win a contract, etc. In a sense no one writes articles
expecting nothing in return.

------
aiCeivi9
I don't like how they idealize EU law. It is actually used by people that
_have_ something to hide.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten#Criticis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten#Criticism)
. I would prefer it to be on case-by-case basis, not automated process.

~~~
karma_fountain
From that wiki article, 95% are people wishing to protect their personal and
private information. If the links are in the public interest then they are not
removed. The only issue I see is that it is Google deciding on what is in the
public interest, which granted is quite disturbing.

~~~
brownbat
The original right to be forgotten case was about how a guy in Spain couldn't
get cheap credit because of past defaults.

It arguably is in the public interest for creditors to know whether or not
someone has defaulted in the past. It allows society to lend money at
reasonable rates.

And it's interesting that the European court found that the Spanish newspaper
that originally published had no obligation to remove this information, but
the foreign tech company that simply relays this existing publication should
change how it does business.

There were no new rules for the Spanish government. That very government
literally ordered the publication as a matter of public interest in the first
place. Why change anything at the source?

If someone were cynical, they might suspect the right to be forgotten had a
touch of protectionism baked into its rationale, alongside the European
idealism.

~~~
tremon
_It arguably is in the public interest for creditors to know whether or not
someone has defaulted in the past._

Seems that that mainly is in the creditors' interest, not the public's.

 _And it 's interesting that the European court found that the Spanish
newspaper that originally published had no obligation to remove this
information, but the foreign tech company that simply relays this existing
publication should change how it does business._

You're being willfully obtuse here. If you know exactly what the European
Court ordered, you also know its rationale -- and thus know that it had
nothing to do with national vs foreign.

~~~
dang
This crosses into personal attack, which is not ok in HN comments.

Could you please read
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
and not do this again?

------
sqdbps
Them's the breaks. Free speech is of loftier purpose than preserving the
reputation of a hedgefund guy.

It's also ironic and quite frankly terrifying that a news outlet would be
lamenting the extensive free speech protections in the US.

This is apparently a part of a series exploring the trendy technopanic of
"fake news online", which increasingly looks like a campaign by old media to
reclaim their gatekeeping status even if that means thumbing their noses at
the first amendment.

~~~
toss1
Um, NO.

Free speech is one thing. It is rightly protected.

But it is not unlimited, and rightly so.

Libel/Slander, yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theater, and incitement to riot are
something different, and are not protected.

Entities such as Google/FB, who serve as editors of what speech/writing/media
gets propagated and featured, even though they do it by algorithm, and it
might be inconvenient, must also be held to account for properly
distinguishing between those types.

~~~
sqdbps
Actually there are no expectations in the text of the first amendment but that
is for another discussion.

As for libel Google isn't the party that wrote that statement so they aren't
liable for libel.

The yelling "fire" thing is a WWI era anachronism that wouldn't hold today.

As for incitement, intent must be proven.

Free speech is very well protected in the US.

~~~
eric_h
> The yelling "fire" thing is a WWI era anachronism that wouldn't hold today.

Eh? Yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre is most definitely still a thing you
could be prosecuted for, especially if someone died/was seriously injured in
the resultant stampede.

~~~
msla
[https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-
tim...](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-
using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/)

> But those who quote Holmes might want to actually read the case where the
> phrase originated before using it as their main defense. If they did, they'd
> realize it was never binding law, and the underlying case, U.S. v. Schenck,
> is not only one of the most odious free speech decisions in the Court's
> history, but was overturned over 40 years ago.

> First, it's important to note U.S. v. Schenck had nothing to do with fires
> or theaters or false statements. Instead, the Court was deciding whether
> Charles Schenck, the Secretary of the Socialist Party of America, could be
> convicted under the Espionage Act for writing and distributing a pamphlet
> that expressed his opposition to the draft during World War I. As the ACLU's
> Gabe Rottman explains, "It did not call for violence. It did not even call
> for civil disobedience."

> The crowded theater remark that everyone remembers was an analogy Holmes
> made before issuing the court's holding. He was explaining that the First
> Amendment is not absolute. It is what lawyers call dictum, a justice's
> ancillary opinion that doesn't directly involve the facts of the case and
> has no binding authority. The actual ruling, that the pamphlet posed a
> "clear and present danger" to a nation at war, landed Schenk in prison and
> continued to haunt the court for years to come.

~~~
logfromblammo
Don't forget Ken "Popehat" White! [https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-
generations-of-a-ha...](https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-
of-a-hackneyed-apologia-for-censorship-are-enough/)

In US law, speaking the truth is never punishable, in any way. Making untrue
statements that result in demonstrable harm to another may be punished.

In some other countries, truth is not an adequate defense against claims of
defamation.

------
kerkeslager
The beginning of this story is pretty interesting:

> But little things bothered Ervine from the beginning. Subtle social cues
> seemed off. Unlike other rich people, these folks didn't talk about fancy
> schools or vacation destinations. Nor was there any name-dropping — social
> norms he had gotten used to in his dealings with the filthy rich.

> "That's part of their bravado and their egos," Ervine says. "But the Turks
> and Caicos never came up. Art Basel never came up."

> Then one night, Ervine met the family for dinner at a Victorian house
> converted into a farm-to-table restaurant in the New York area. After
> dessert, Yalincak said his driver would be coming to get him. But out on the
> curb, Ervine spotted him jumping into a beat-up cab.

> "The hair stood up on the back of my neck," Ervine says.

> He called a friend — a military veteran with contacts at the FBI — and soon
> the bureau unearthed a suspicious legal trail and launched a criminal
> investigation. In that case, Ervine handed over the information he had
> collected on the family and spoke with law enforcement.

> He thought the matter was over. Yalincak was convicted of fraud, sentenced
> to 42 months in prison and then deported.

I'm not saying Yalincak didn't get what he deserved, but I can't help but
think that if he had committed the same crimes, but coming from a rich family,
he'd have gotten away with it.

More to the point, it's disturbing to me that even if a person _weren 't_
committing fraud, they might be viewed suspiciously simply because they didn't
signal wealth in the ways wealthy people expect them to.

~~~
Izkata
> it's disturbing to me that even if a person weren't committing fraud, they
> might be viewed suspiciously simply because they didn't signal wealth in the
> ways wealthy people expect them to.

I think you're missing some of the cues - that's only part of it. It's not
just that he didn't signal wealth, but that he was inconsistent about it ("his
driver would be coming to get him") and straight-up lying when he did signal
it.

Plus those were only three examples, no idea how much more there was.

------
scandox
> After dessert, Yalincak said his driver would be coming to get him. But out
> on the curb, Ervine spotted him jumping into a beat-up cab.

> "The hair stood up on the back of my neck," Ervine says.

I know the context somewhat justifies his reaction but still it's very funny
to think of a world in which getting into a taxi prompts the person you're
meeting with to contact law enforcement...I mean what if his driver just got
caught in traffic? What if he decided he wanted to ditch the driver and have
some privacy? Instead his dinner host is watching him out a window and decides
his choice of transport is suspect?

~~~
PostOnce
Maybe he was put on guard by the guy mentioning his driver at all? It might be
suspect to mention your driver at all if it is in fact a normal occurrence.

~~~
jessaustin
TFA said that Ervine was suspicious because of how _little_ Yalincak had
flexed about all his awesome possessions and privileges. It's possible that
really rich people really are assholes.

~~~
zeveb
> It's possible that really rich people really are assholes.

More charitably, just as poorer folks talk about the cool beer they had last
week or the really great movie they saw, maybe rich folks talk about the
brewery they just bought or their race horse's recent win.

Different sums of money allow one different pleasures in life. There's nothing
assholish about that.

~~~
txsh
You’ve never had a conversation with a poor person, have you?

------
leroy_masochist
This article on the Yalincak family and their history of fraud is an
interesting and somewhat depressing read.

[http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/12070/](http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/12070/)

~~~
martey
More recently: [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/nyregion/an-inmate-
and-a-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/nyregion/an-inmate-and-a-
scholar.html)

------
brightball
We talk about search results here but reviews are the same way. People who
have never interacted with you get the ability to slander and hurt brick and
mortar businesses with no consequence.

If you try to get Google to remove a review like that it’s basically the same
story.

~~~
slx26
At some point we will probably have to start considering expiry dates for
digital data more seriously (or at least expiry dates for public visibility),
and not only for the waste on hard drives. The problem is that nowadays is so
"cheap" to not "forget", that we forget why it might be important.

~~~
brightball
Yea. I know of at least one incident where a person accused an employee of a
company of something pretty terrible in their personal life...and did it as a
review on the businesses site.

Took 6 months to get it down IIRC.

------
roadbeats
I reported a Blogger account impersonating me more than 5 times, submitting my
passport copies, never got any response from Google.

Instagram is the same. Someone is impersonating my wife with her full name, we
and bunch of friends reported it many times in different mediums, never had a
single response.

------
alex_duf
>There's no humanity or kindness in Google. It's not about anyone else. It's
all about Google

I've said it before, and I'll say it again

Technology is the mirror of humanity. We somehow don't like the face we see
but we blame the mirror.

Not that google is spotless, but really that shit show is just a reflection of
how poor our humanity is in the first place.

------
ikeboy
Somewhat ironically, it took me about a minute to find a ripoff report
claiming some contractor was stiffed working on Bridg-it for several thousand.

The name behind that complaint appears to be a real person, with an active
twitter account with hundreds of followers and over a thousand tweets.

~~~
jessaustin
Sounds like a job for Bridg-it!

------
phonebucket
"It looked like he had something to hide, not like Google had made the mistake
of highlighting false information."

That quote explains a lot of the misunderstanding. Google's service should to
be help a user find what they are looking for within the constraints of
Google's legal obligations. Google's job should not be to police the accuracy
of information.

~~~
neolefty
And yet Google _does_ want accurate information to show up higher, in general.
It's a hard problem.

------
ben509
Playing devil's advocate for Google, I think they're right not to remove
defamatory material.

There is no right to defame, per the maxim 'your right to swing your fist ends
at the tip of my nose.'

But there are valid cases for defamatory material to persist. The most obvious
example is if you take someone to court for defamation, it's evidence and it's
part of the public record. Our historical record is liable to be quite warped
by all the material that's been forgotten.

As long as we simply disappear defamatory or otherwise harmful speech, we
don't really deal with it as a society. We really need to stop being so
absurdly credulous.

This guy had $100K to fix his problem. But many people don't have that, so
they're vulnerable to being personally defamed.

------
lordnacho
If he were to move to Europe, would Google remove the results for him,
worldwide?

~~~
joopxiv
No, only from the European versions of Google. Google is actually sued by the
French government because they feel that searches for French citizens should
be censored based on the EU law on Google worldwide. Which to a certain extend
makes sense because right now, if you see the red text mentioned in the
article you can just visit the US version of the site to find the original
results.

However, if it would be China, Russia or any other authoritarian regime
demanding that Google would censor their international engine, I think the
sentiment would be quite different.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
This is the current behavior, but Google has received significant legal
pushback from that stance. Canada's Supreme Court has also ruled that Google
must remove results about their citizens globally.

Google, looking for a friendly court, decided to ask the Northern District of
California for an injunction preventing them from complying with the order,
and California, true to form, issued such an injunction.

Of course, the Northen District of California doesn't have jurisdiction over
the Supreme Court of Canada, so by my read, Google is currently in violation
of a court order in Canada. As far as I know though, Canada hasn't taken this
any further yet.

[http://fortune.com/2017/06/28/canada-supreme-court-
google/](http://fortune.com/2017/06/28/canada-supreme-court-google/)

~~~
amarkov
The Supreme Court had noted in their ruling that, if Google were to show that
it is in fact illegal in their home jurisdiction to comply with the order,
that would change the analysis. Courts are generally pretty willing to engage
in comity analysis; they understand there's a problem when a Canadian court
orders an American company to violate American law.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
There's no law in the US that prevents Google from delisting a search result.
Google essentially asked a US court to make something up so they could defy
the order. I don't really feel that lies in the area of compliance with the
order.

------
psyc
Sci-fi author Greg Egan's comical crusade against Google, to remove
misinformation about him:

[http://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html](http://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html)

------
DanBC
> In Europe, if there's a webpage with information about you that you don't
> like — because it's either inaccurate or just too personal — you can make
> Google hide it from search results.

This isn't true. You fill out a form and Google then decides whether they'll
hide the information or not. It's not automatic and there's plenty of results
that don't get hidden.

------
upofadown
The article fails to mention why the successful defamation suit did not result
in the takedown of the website and the payment of damages.

~~~
jeremyjh
I'm sure it didn't help that his attacker lived in Turkey.

------
exikyut
> _In fact, even after Google stopped listing the defamatory site, the search
> page added a disclaimer — in red letters — that Ervine 's results had been
> altered._

Whoa. I wouldn't mind seeing a screenshot of that!

~~~
yosamino
It's not red anymore, but I remember having seen it before
[https://imgur.com/a/n7g9V](https://imgur.com/a/n7g9V) (link goes here:
[https://policies.google.com/faq](https://policies.google.com/faq))

Google also does this in response to DMCA requests, the difference being that
for the right-to-be-forgotten thing, there is no way to see _what_ was
removed. For DMCA takedowns, google hosts and links to the specific DMCA
request, wich contains the URLs that were removed, rendering the while process
somewhat moot.

~~~
exikyut
Interesting. That's a Europe-specific snippet though (incidentally I've never
seen that before; do I need to be _in_ Europle to see it - is the right-to-be-
forgotten thing easily defeatable with a VPN?!).

------
animex
My friend had a bunch of juvenile crap posted on "The Dirty" by ex-boyfriends
which subsequently became the #1 hit on Google for her unique name.
Employers/Employees would ask her about it and she always felt embarassed
about it being up there. Subsequently, she disliked anyone who Google'd
people. Her father paid a 3rd party company $5000 who managed to remove the
link from the first page. So far it appears to have worked (1 year has
passed).

------
boombox521
The story got retracted in total by NPR: click on the NPR link. It seems that
Jeffrey Ervine, the self-proclaimed anti-cyber bully advocate, had fabricated
everything from start to finish, to help his Bridg-It business sell its
products. Congrats NPR and all the others here! Way to go!

~~~
boombox521
Here is the Jeffrey Ervine retraction by NPR. I wonder if the Bridg-It
sponsors will get a note about his actions?

[https://www.npr.org/2018/04/03/598239092/the-man-who-
spent-1...](https://www.npr.org/2018/04/03/598239092/the-man-who-
spent-100k-to-remove-a-lie-from-google)

------
djrogers
Sounds like a ridiculous process, one that he probably shouldn't have had to
go through.

Since the underlying problem was really the blog posts search engine ranking,
it seems as if it would have been better to spend about 10% of that 100K on
getting a few articles written about the situation and SEOing the crap out of
them. This would have had a similar effect, and made it harder for the defamer
to simply recreate his site with similar effects.

------
ironjunkie
The root of this problem is that we put too much trust into Google. It became
a beast that can decide what we are and aren't supposed to see.

That's why they get away with not-responding to individual requests.

I said this before, but I really hope the whole privacy debate will relaunch a
healthy discussion about how the big platforms are actually a bad thing all
together

------
sg0
Similar to FB Newsfeed recently introducing an "i"-circle for posts by news
organizations (QED), that sort of helps to verify the source, we need
something similar in Google search results (that would probably make it
challenging to return results within half a second).

------
zeveb
This article is advocacy for the so-called 'right to be forgotten.' It's
trying to convince people in the U.S. that the 'right' to be forgotten is just
about forcing Google not to highlight false information.

That, of course, is itself false, and to imply so is to lie by implication.
The 'right' to be forgotten is about suppression of _true_ information. E.g.
if someone wants to remove information about a crime he committed from online
newspapers, then he can. The 'right' to be forgotten is an Orwellian attempt
to rewrite history. Americans should resist its introduction, and Europeans
should fight for its abolition.

It's perfectly fine to force Google to stop linking to a lie; it's completely
and totally wrong to force Google to stop linking to the truth.

~~~
wsy
This is a spin that Google itself wants to give this law, but by European law
the search provider must weigh individual vs. public interest, and if there is
valid public interest, keep the information online.

See e.g. here for more background
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/04/google_peston_bbc_d...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/04/google_peston_bbc_delisting_not_compliant_w_public_interest_law_says_expert/)

~~~
zeveb
The court case which created the so-called 'right to be forgotten' was about
someone who wanted his poor credit erased from the historical record. One
would imagine that there's a public interest in knowing if someone is a poor
credit risk: anyone he asks for money has a need to know.

------
ausjke
looks like what Europe does should be learned by google-in-the-USA, does
google have the responsibility to put only true info online? or it just spits
out whatever it can find?

facebook says it collects private info for ads to profit so that the poor can
use facebook freely, I am not rich but I'm willing to pay google for a nominal
fee to get quality results while surfing, 20% users pay that fee might be
enough to cover the rest 80% that can use google for free, not sure how this
will work, but this sounds better to me than the $100K legal cost here.

------
mattnewton
Wait, the guy who wrote the lies about the subject of the article, what crime
did he commit? The article makes it seem like he was investigated by the FBI
for pretending to be rich!

~~~
eric_h
Fraud.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/nyregion/former-nyu-
stude...](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/nyregion/former-nyu-student-
pleads-guilty-to-fraud.html)

~~~
mattnewton
Thanks, that’s pretty serious. Seems like they could have mentioned that
earlier in the article.

------
sgroppino
Could he not have moved temporarily to anywhere in the EU and, as a EU
resident, asked google to take down the page from the search results?

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thinkcomp
Hakan Yalincak called posing as a lawyer to get his case information removed
from PlainSite. Here it is:

[https://www.plainsite.org/tags/yalincak-crime-
family/](https://www.plainsite.org/tags/yalincak-crime-family/)

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known
aka
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb)

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shthed
Anyone got a link to the site he wanted removed?

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jessaustin
_He called a friend — a military veteran with contacts at the FBI — and soon
the bureau unearthed a suspicious legal trail and launched a criminal
investigation. In that case, Ervine handed over the information he had
collected on the family and spoke with law enforcement.

He thought the matter was over. Yalincak was convicted of fraud, sentenced to
42 months in prison and then deported._

If one hasn't been on the wrong end of this kind of situation, one might miss
the significance of this part of the story. It could be argued that NPR is
actually misrepresenting this process, by omitting the certain fact that
Ervine paid this "friend" tens of thousands of dollars for this FBI-as-my-own-
taxpayer-supported-private-investigation-and-fast-track-to-federal-
prosecution-service. Much of that money either has or will make its way back
to the FBI agents who did "the work" on this case. Yes Virginia, this is
corruption. Normal citizens don't have Hoover's Gang at their beck and call
anytime they're disappointed by a business experience.

Since FBI can generally make a case against any innocent victim who comes to
their attention, it's far from clear that Yalincak ever actually did anything
wrong. ("proposed a sham hedge fund"? What the hell is that?) It is clear that
this Asian immigrant and his family disappointed this rich well-connected
asshole WASP Ervine in some business deal, and then he spent 42 months in
federal PMITAP. Any human being would be frustrated with that situation, and
might even publish his account of that frustration online. (Which account
seems to have disappeared into some memory hole, but maybe that's the point?)

Fuck Jeff Ervine, and fuck anyone who uses his wealth to hide the fact that
wealth is based on fucking people over. Question: do we think little Jeff has
something to do with this URL?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakan_Yalincak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakan_Yalincak)

~~~
pjc50
Is the story about the $25m forged cheque true, or not?
[http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/12070/](http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/12070/)

~~~
boombox521
NY Mag was sued at least when I looked up the case and there appears to be a
notice of settlement posted on the docket. I believe they settled. Sometimes
it makes more sense to get money than ask for a retraction when coming out of
prison :-)

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candiodari
I find it baffling that this guy gets any support here at all:

1) he actually has the money to spend on this. He doesn't have a problem.

2) he's advertising his own company, and it's a typical scam : he's
advertising his ability to take information about someone down ...

3) Needless to say, this person is selling "his services" to things like K-12
schools (read: customers that pay, but don't want to pay, and how much do you
want to bet they never see any of that service they paid for, but never wanted
?)

