
Jesse Willms, the Dark Lord of the Internet (2014) - bond
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-dark-lord-of-the-internet/355726/?single_page=true
======
MicroBerto
I've been dabbling with a theory, and it goes something along the lines of
"Evil thinks big, but Good thinks small".

There is a _ton_ of incentive for guys like this to scale big, and they can
bootstrap it pretty easily once they have a profitable method. On the other
hand, it's much tougher for a brand like Consumer Reports to do the same,
because the effort is so much greater and the ROI is so much smaller. You
simply don't make much money when you're un-selling stuff, and it's an eternal
game of whack-a-mole fighting off scams.

So the "good guys" who would rage against these rip-offs end up thinking
smaller, perhaps going after just one thing, like why this skin care offer is
a scam. You get lost in the noise because you're stuck in a swamp of other
evildoer affiliates who are more greatly incentivized to lie. Ultimately,
there's very few _systematic_ tools out there that can encompass on the number
of niches his network can, and visibly tell the truth about them all.

Further, once a doer of good who's scaling starts to see success, the power
begins to corrupt, and aligning with profitable evils becomes difficult to
resist.

I see this problem at all levels, especially in corrupt governments. It just
feels like we are currently systematically broken as a species. Good people
may or may not be outnumbered, but we're most definitely out- _powered_.

~~~
bduerst
It could also be narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), coupled with
survivor bias.

You don't see all the people with NPD who crashed because they burned all the
bridges around them, but the ones who do make it last long enough to make
reality match their ego's dreams, if even for a short while. To someone with
NPD, they don't see themselves as evil, and can be oblivious to how they take
advantage of those around them.

It's something I've been thinking more about with the recent elections.

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Animats
Oh, that guy.

If this guy had dialed back the scam level by about half, he'd probably still
be in business. There are lots of people trying to be him. Visit Black Hat
World to meet some.

His values aren't that far from those of many startup companies. Grow at any
cost. Use "dark patterns" to trick users. Hide things in the EULA. Don't ask
too many questions about "affiliates". Make it hard to cancel. Google was
fined $500 million when they were caught in the FBI's "sportsdrugs.com" sting.
(The FBI had a fake drug lord who was supposedly trying to take over the
athletic steroid business. Google actively helped him advertise.)

~~~
smitherfield
_> If this guy had dialed back the scam level by about half, he'd probably
still be in business._

He is.

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overcast
What a piece of trash this guy is. Not only is he behind a lot of those
garbage ads everywhere, but once they suckered someone in, he managed to scam
them by signing them up for reoccurring billing on their credit cards.

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55555
I often consider how much easier my life would be if I only had more
'flexible' morals.

~~~
blahi
Morals are not set in stone. Everybody has different morals. One might argue
that people who fall for this kind of crap are very, very stupid. Being weak
means that the predators eat you for lunch. In this case they just mooch off
you. Humans are the apex predators and people like to forget that just because
we slaughter the prey in an industrial complex and stab it with a fork.

There are other considerations both specific to this case, and in general, and
I don't say I condone 100% of his actions, but don't be so quick to think that
he is just rotten and you are superior.

~~~
55555
I don't think he's 'rotten' and I don't think I'm 'superior', and I only
claimed that he has more 'flexible' morals, and that having 'flexible' morals
makes paying one's mortgage easier, which it does.

> Morals are not set in stone. Everybody has different morals.

Indeed. Some people make the personal choice to "evolve" above the dog-eat-
dog-world mentality, for example. As another example, while some people stab
their prey with their forks, others choose to be vegan.

> One might argue that people who fall for this kind of crap are very, very
> stupid. Being weak means...

I'm not going to argue with you because we clearly have different morals, as
you've pointed out. I don't think ripping people off is okay just because they
are "stupid". Would it be even more okay if they were diagnosably mentally
challenged?

But if you actually believe that the only people who fall this stuff are
"stupid" people, and by that you mean that they are exceptional or abnormal,
then you haven't spent very long in the affiliate marketing industry.

Pretty much everyone falls for 'scams'. My sister signed up to a cell phone
rebill, her friend bought a diet pill rebill, my grandmother pays her
'financial manager' an obscene amount, and I just bought a book off amazon
that claimed to be a "Thai translation" but was actually sold by a seller who
has translated everything in the public domain into every language using
Google translate and then prints them on-demand (Get your shit together,
Bezos).

I know a lot of people like Jesse Wilms, and perhaps the saddest part of it to
me is that they are extremely human and very normal. The potential for his
moral flexibility exists in all of us, given the right circumstances and
surroundings.

~~~
blahi
You say you don't think you are superior but you show the opposite. There is
no moral "flexibility". You still imply that there is a moral code set in
stone and those people deviated from it.

>Some people make the personal choice to "evolve" above the dog-eat-dog-world
mentality, for example. As another example, while some people stab their prey
with their forks, others choose to be vegan.

One might argue that those people simply don't want to face the reality so
they pretend.

You and your sister got tricked, but your sister's friend is definitely stupid
for believing magic pills will make her fit. Your grandmother can be either
way, but if you did a good job explaining to her why a financial manager isn't
a good proposition for somebody who is not a multi-millionaire, she is most
probably stupid too. And I don't mean that they are abnormal. Plenty of people
are stupid. Most even, one might say.

You can choose to pretend, just like the vegans, if that gives you solace.

~~~
55555
Let's just agree to disagree. :)

On another note, do you have any books or readings you'd recommend on moral
relativism (?) or whatever your worldview is called? I imagine you came to
this conclusion after a lot of thought and life experience, but is there
anyone or anything you read or listened to that you'd recommend?

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nxzero
Reminds me of a guy that made millions selling from spammy looking single-page
websites that would scroll on forever; aka long form sales letters. Believe
the guy died racing a super car on a track; can't recall his name.

~~~
adwordsjedi
Corey Rudl

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onetwotree
Here's a real gem, from an FTC official:

> There’s a fine line between shutting down the Internet and policing it

Straight out of a lobbyists mouth, I'd imagine. It has the classic "true, but
only in certain contexts" thing going on - sure, it's a great argument
against, say, SOPA, but as an argument against a simple legal requirement that
big internet players do their part to reign obviously malicious advertising,
it's pretty bogus.

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rw2
This was written in 2014, I wonder what scheme he is doing today.

~~~
overcast
Per the article.

His major ventures today provide consumers with driving records, criminal
records, and vehicle-history reports (just as Carfax does) across dozens of
different pages, notably carhistory.us.org, dmv.us.org, vehiclehistory.com,
and vehiclehistoryrecord.com. In fact, anyone looking for these services would
have a hard time avoiding him: as of November, if you searched vehicle history
on Google, Yahoo, or Bing, ads for Willms’s sites were among the first things
you would see. By the looks of it, Willms offers a terrific deal—just $1 for a
vehicle-history report, compared with $39.99 for one from Carfax. Because of
this, Willms’s lawyer claims that the sites have received “several hundred
thousand positive comments related to the product.”

So more of the same scams.

~~~
55555
He almost definitely partly chose this niche so that he could respond to
craigslist/classified ads of people selling their cars and say "I'm ready to
pay [huge amount] in cash today but I need to see a vehicle history report
from XYZ first."

For like a decade now, people have been posting fake job ads and then telling
applicants to pay for their own "background check" in an identical scam.

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krrrh
It's horrible to understand how much of the content we consume for free online
is paid for by these scams. His açai ads were all over fairly major
publishers' websites. The content industry relies on hugely regressive
exploitation of the gullible and unsophisticated, and adblockers are only
making it more regressive in the short term.

LyricFind which licenses lyrics from major publishers to websites is another
example. They would license content to for free if you included their ads for
"ringtone" subscriptions which were added to monthly phone bills in a process
few consumers understood or expected.

