
Jesse Willms, the Dark Lord of the Internet - 67726e
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-dark-lord-of-the-internet/355726/?single_page=true
======
LanceJones
This guy is a criminal. Why does The Atlantic paint him as some kind of
marketing genius? If people knew how they were going to be charged for his
products and services, they never would've hit the Buy button. He tricks
people, which is not a talent IMO. I'm Canadian and from Edmonton, and I'm
embarrassed that this fool lives on this side of the 49th.

~~~
nocoment
The article seemed pretty balanced actually. He is not a convicted criminal
thanks to unfortunate loopholes..

Tracking his business closely would be a good opportunity for legislators
looking to reform payment systems. But any reform would have to affect a whole
class of payments designed based on human psychological defects. I.e. a good
reform is a big battle with most phone companies, gyms, etc.

I found it funny to reach the end and see their affiliate marketing... So,
thanks "theatlantic", and I would fund your article through what sounds like a
very legitimate affiliate retirement plan, but Jesus is already a part of my
father's retirement plan. (He swears to him he'll never retire.)

------
contingencies
TLDR:

 _Between 2007 and 2011, the lawsuit claimed, Willms defrauded consumers of
some $467 million by enticing them to sign up for “risk free” product trials
and then billing their cards recurring fees for a litany of automatically
enrolled services they hadn’t noticed in the fine print. In just a few months,
Willms’s companies could charge a consumer hundreds of dollars like this, and
making the flurry of debits stop was such a convoluted process for those
ensnared by one of his schemes that some customers just canceled their credit
cards and opened new ones._

ie. this guy basically used the brokenness of credit card recurring charge
management systems to steal small amounts of money from many dumber consumers
on a recurring basis, and became filthy rich in the process. Apparently
without actually breaking any laws... but _In the end, Willms’s arguments won
little sympathy in court_.

~~~
sejje
Re: " _in the end_ ": Except it didn't matter, since he kept all the cash and
is still doing it today.

------
hippee-lee
To a certain extent this behavior is nothing new. The 12 CD's for a penny
scams I fell pray to as a child come to mind. The people who think like that
have just moved online.

One thing I don't see getting much attention here is the section on regulation
and the lack of interest by tech companies who provide the platforms for
people like this to exploit on.

Quoting part of the article, "... the tech companies that carry those ads tend
to throw up their hands an declaim that the web is so huge that no one could
hope to monitor it all."

This section of the article, where Edelman is quoted several times, stood out
to me. It made me a little more sympathetic to regulation. In that, if there
is no incentive inside the large tech companies to identify and punish or
eliminate the Jesse Williams of the world from their platforms, why shouldn't
they be held accountable for the consequences of the behavior enabled by the
platform they developed?

One more quotes that stood out to me and made sense:

\- "If Jesse Williams is responsible for the bad things his contractors did,
why is Google not responsible for the bad things its advertisers did?"

To extend on that and not just limit this to Google - Uber recently got some
bad publicity in LA. One incident where someone was charged several hundred
dollars for what amounted to a cab ride home to from a bar and another where
an uber rider left their cell phone in the car. Then the driver held the phone
ransom for several hundred dollars and still never returned it. In the one
case Uber suspended the drivers account and was trying to help the phone
owner.

The point I am trying to make by bringing up Uber, who is not an advertising
company, is as follows. Technology extends and scales human ability. But the
onus is still on people to use technology morally, ethically & responsibly.
The double edge on technology's sword is that not all people make choices with
morals or ethics in mind. So, is a technology provider responsible for self
policing their platform? Idk but reading the Atlantic article sway my opinion
in the direction of, If the technology provider won't or "can't" be
responsible then they open the doors for regulation without any sympathy from
me.

~~~
jlgaddis
_> To a certain extent this behavior is nothing new. The 12 CD's for a penny
scams I fell pray to as a child come to mind._

I'm not sure that I'd call that a scam. Myself and several of my friends were
legitimate customers and never had any issues.

If it were a scam, though, it certainly worked both ways. I worked for
Columbia House as a teenager ("data entry"), entering in all those
applications that people sent in. We received an absurd number of obviously
bullshit applications (e.g.: "Mickey Mouse", "Donald Duck", etc.) -- sometimes
one after another, all with the same address and handwriting -- but were told
to enter them in anyways.

~~~
hippee-lee
Perhaps scam is the wrong word? Like the online affiliate model, there was
quite a bit of fine print that I did not read. Notably the part (I'm
paraphrasing here) where I get charged and continue to get charged if certain
conditions are not met. As a 10 year old perhaps scam is the wrong word. But,
to me, it feels very similar to the affiliate model of advertising online
today.

------
RankingMember
Finally, we get to see the face of the creator of those "1 weird tip" ads. Now
if him and the woman who created those dumb dancing lowermybills ads would get
together we'd have a real turd bomb in the making.

There's nothing "genius" about ripping people off over and over again, it just
takes a high degree of disrespect for your fellow man. That and, jesus, if
you're going to make your living as a scam artist at least hire a web designer
that doesn't make every one of your websites look so obviously shoddy and
awful.

~~~
daphneokeefe
The poor-quality web design is by intent. Users think they are dealing with a
small business trying to sell its merchandise online without a fancy web team.
It's like con artists who dress poorly to look like their mark. More credible.

~~~
domdip
Alternatively, the poor quality ensures that only rubes will click through.
Why PPC for people who are going to be skeptical anyway?

------
PetrolMan
Off topic rant: why in the world does that site take nearly half a minute to
load completely and why does it keep jumping around to different sections
(eventually leaving me at the bottom of the screen) during that absurd load?

I'm still not sure about the jumping but the load time might be the result of:

    
    
      370 requests  ❘  4.0 MB transferred  ❘  45.30 s (load: 41.60 s, DOMContentLoaded: 19.41 s)
    

Edit: typo and more data

~~~
devindotcom
Ghostery counts 19 or 20 trackers depending on what you want included. It's
getting out of control!

~~~
ToastyMallows
I block everything and I get 25 blocked when visiting The Atlantic. Probably
the worst site I've seen yet.

------
seiji
There's a contingent of HN people reading this article who see nothing wrong
at all and are now trying to figure out how to become the same thing
themselves.

~~~
speeder
I am one of those, not because I want to scam people, but because I make a
legitimate product that receives lots of praise and even some press, and yet
my sales are so near zero that I don't even bother remembering how much they
are.

------
hawkharris
I don't like to dwell on writing style because that's not the focus of this
community (plus, I'm far from perfect when it comes to writing), but I thought
the author's overuse of descriptive words made this story hard to read:

"That Friday afternoon, resplendent in a lustrous violet button-down, William
packed half a dozen friends into a private plane on a frosty Edmonton,
Alberta, tarmac and jetted off to Las Vegas."

This was the second or third sentence. I was just getting into the flow of the
story and felt bombarded by all that information. I could have waited to read
about the color of the guy's shirt.

~~~
hkmurakami
The Atlantic isn't quite as high browed as the New Yorker, but they're both
literary magazines and so the prose style is somewhat to be expected. :P

(The Atlantic is one of my favorite magazines)

~~~
hawkharris
I appreciate your point. I'm also a big fan of The Atlantic and The New Yorker
is my favorite magazine. :)

I think most of the magazines' authors write literary pieces without overusing
descriptive words. To me adjectives and adverbs are the worst culprits in
terms of slowing down readers. It's usually better to pack meaning into verbs.

For example, someone could write, "A tall attractive woman with bright shiny
shoes approached the fat gentleman by the bar." Alternatively, he or she could
write, "The woman sauntered toward the gentleman by the bar."

While the two sentences aren't equivalent in meaning, they paint a similar
picture. The second sentence is better in my opinion because it keeps a
certain flow going.

Stephen King wrote about this, referring to adverbs as "flat tires":
[http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/13/stephen-
ki...](http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/13/stephen-king-on-
adverbs/)

------
suprgeek
I think there are three clear parties that need to take more active steps to
try to reign in these kinds of Shysters:

1) Google - Institute a "Reputation Rank"/or other algos. internally when
selling Ads thru any platform. If there is some hint that an ad-buyer is into
some questionable stuff yank their ads, ban them from buying any more. Have a
dedicated staff that investigates fraud ads and make it simple for the
customers to file complaints about specific ads.

2) Visa/MC/Amex - The central lynch-pin - if they cannot bill, they cannot
cheat. Tune your systems to ban these shysters faster.

3) Govt. - Create a dedicated Agency to help consumers with Internet commerce
related fraud complaints. The nature of Internet makes it a fundamentally
different animal to conduct business on - you need a fundamentally different
kind of dept. to help keep track of Fraud.

~~~
stock_toaster
For #2 I think it would be nice to see greater availability of "virtual CC
numbers", where you can set some arbitrary limit for and it is not exceeded.

It seems limited to a few banks that I choose not to be customers of though,
so maybe the feature doesn't work as well as I hope it would.

I would certainly like to see better tools as a card owner, which I could use
to better protect myself.

------
danhodgins
It's worth looking at this from multiple angles.

The human being in me says: "This behaviour is morally and ethically
reprehensible, and should be illegal. He should be in jail because he's a con
artist who defrauds people."

The idealist in me says: "This guy is preying on the weak and hurting people."

The ruthless entrepreneur in me says: "This guy is using a system that works,
and it's producing real results".

The marketer and strategist in me says: "This guy is using a system that
relies on intentionally ugly or shady ads to qualify out people who are
capable of fighting back. He then gets their credit card number, and
repeatedly makes a bunch of sketchy recurring charges that are nearly
impossible to fight and/or cancel. What a genius system for making money.
People can't fight something they don't know about or are unwilling to
cancel."

From a purely objective standpoint his system works because it's based on an
understanding of human behavior, psychology and emotion. He knows how to
create ads that get clicked, and how to get people to enter their credit card
numbers and agree to charges.

We would do well to learn how to get past emotions like disgust and flip
around the perspective here. How can we apply some of his strategies and
tactics in ways that are morally and ethically sound to our own legitimate
ventures?

Here are the insights I gained from the article:

* There is a HUGE traffic opportunity with ads and ad networks, and it's highly scalable * Focus on areas of high existing search demand * If you can convert, you can really crank up the paid traffic engine * If you generate the most revenue in your niche you'll win the advertising game because you can pay the most for traffic * Upsell to a bunch of small recurring charges that are bite-sized so they don't seem like much, but they add up to a lot over time

From a purely analytical and objective standpoint you gotta hand it to the guy
for his execution.

------
ryan_j_naughton
This a seems a clear advantage for bitcoin - scammy businesses don't have
access to your account to continue charging you (unlike credit cards).

Sure, you can't do the initial chargeback but the main issue here was with the
recurring charges.

Also bitcoin preventing chargebacks eliminates fraud for the retailer.

~~~
almosnow
On a side issue, that kind of sucks too, subscriptions are cool, let's see how
they get implemented over bitcoin.

Probably you could authorize your wallet holder to deduct a certanin amount
each month.

~~~
speeder
Chargeback and subscription can be done using bitcoin scripting, that is part
of the protocol.

------
mercurial
I find it unreal to read about a professional conman having his scam
advertised on Google shortly after the Rap Genius incident. Clearly Google has
interesting priorities.

------
cheeseprocedure
It seems like a number of problems (erosion of privacy, abuse of advertising
channels, etc) would cease to exist if users were charged some small sum for
the use of Web services that are now ad-supported.

As someone who's utterly naive when it comes to building a Web property, I'd
like to understand why this idea is bad/hard/crazy. What is a typical set of
eyeballs really worth on a high-traffic site? Are paywalls the kiss of death?

~~~
bjourne
How would those web services attract users without placing ads on other sites?

------
dreamdu5t
If the terms are listed, and the user states they read and agree to the terms,
_it is not fraud._ Feeling regret does not equate to fraud.

If the terms were made available before purchase, and the user was made to
agree to the terms, then I do not see what fraud took place. If people want to
agree to contracts they don't read, then there's not much anyone can do about
that...

If someone did not think there would be recurring charges, then they did not
read the terms they took responsibility for reading and that they _stated_
they read and agreed to.

Either people knew about the recurring charges and agreed... or they stated
that they read the terms they actually didn't read and agree to them.

The real problem here, if there is one at all, is that people agree to terms
they don't bother reading.

------
dschiptsov
Something is deeply wrong with the world in which a scammer who spams and
exploits idiots and then over-charge their cards, the way porn industry does
for ages, is portrayed as a new hero.

~~~
simonw
Where did you see him being portrayed as a hero?

------
zbosveld
Sounds like a opportunity for the NSA -- who should be aware of all of this --
to close them down and gain some credibility.

------
anoncowherd
I wonder if the ever-vigilant FTC has noticed anything shady about what Wall
Street has been doing for years now.

------
bjornsing
Finally a post that warrants the most overused of HN accusations: SNAKE OIL!
;)

