
How being a bully fuels this trader's profits because of Google - dmitri1981
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.xml
======
hristov
The most shocking thing here is not the actions of that shady online store,
but those of Citibank. The internet is full of assholes and cheaters. But
Citibank should take better care of their customers. She should sue Citibank
in small claims court and get her money back from there. Once the banks start
losing money over this they will quickly yank the merchant accounts of the
shady online shop and that will be that.

Also, while police do not care much about tales of repeated phone calls and
harassment, they do care about counterfeiting (because congress makes them
care). So she should report those guys to whichever FBI department deals with
counterfeiting, and they might find themselves quickly in jail.

~~~
chime
If this happened to me, there is NO WAY I would let my credit card company
off. Also, I have disputed something in the past and I remember signing
paperwork instead of just verbal acceptance/rejection of the charges. I wonder
why that didn't happen here.

~~~
reduxredacted
_If this happened to me, there is NO WAY I would let my credit card company
off._ ... _verbal acceptance/rejection of the charges_

A very similar circumstance happened to me involving significantly less money.
There are a few things I learned:

1) I have never seen a cardholder agreement that doesn't require all disputes
to be done in writing.

2) This doesn't mean that the Customer Service Rep will tell you that in order
to be fully compliant, you need to submit your claim in writing, nor does it
mean that they will tell you anything other than "it's all set". If you're
lucky, they might tell you that you should not pay the disputed portion of the
bill.

It's _not_ common sense because it's so rare to run into problems like this.
Most people have never done a charge-back (I've done less than ten in my life
and most were in the late 90s). It's incredibly important to research your
terms when something like this arises and follow them carefully. For credit
cards, the dispute process is usually written on the back of your statement.

Here's an example from a bill in my hand:

"If you think there is an error on your statement, write to us at:

<bank>

In your letter, give us the following information: Account information...
Dollar amount... Description of problem...

You must notify us of any potential errors _in writing_ (their emphasis).

You may call us, but if you do not we are not required to investigate any
potential errors and you may have to pay the amount in question." (I used the
billing mistake section, but the charge-back section is basically the same
with a few more restrictions and refers to this process in its writing).

The reporter did a disservice in not explaining where Ms. Rodriguez may have
faltered in her dealing with Citibank and not providing a few tips for people
running into this sort of jerk (or jerk-company-response). My personal tip,
make copies of everything you send including the envelope and send it
certified mail. If you still get jerked around by a large corporation and you
don't have hopes of getting your story written up in the New York Times, send
a letter outlining your problem with a detailed timeline to the same corporate
address (or a more appropriate one if you can find it) and include a CC: line
with whatever regulatory body oversees the industry in question ... along with
your local and state representative. That netted me a triple refund (disputed
amount was $45) after two months of getting nowhere.

~~~
husein10
Just bc your credit card agreement says something does not mean that that
provision is enforceable under the laws of a given jurisdiction.

A huge percentage of contracts include clauses that are unenforceable, yet the
provisions are included in the contract to give the credit card company any
leverage it can get.

------
arithmetic
This is completely nuts. I'm surprised that this company gets away (and
actually be pretty successful) with it's predatorial behavior towards it's
customers. I searched for DecorMyEyes, and while the first result is the
company itself, the rest of the page is filled with "My bad experience with
DecorMyEyes" and "Consumer complaints against DecorMyEyes". Now I get that
people are usually searching for the name of the company that makes the
glasses (like Ciba Vision) and not DecorMyEyes, but doesn't one usually buy
things online from fairly reputed sources (and you'd look up the company if
you didn't know them)?

~~~
RockyMcNuts
Never order anything from Brooklyn without a thorough background check.
Seriously. I live here and it's a cottage industry: offer too good to be true
prices, game shopping sites and search engines, post fake ratings and reviews,
when enough people catch on start up under a new name. This guy seems to have
taken it to a whole new level though.

See some photos of storefronts here (some are totally legit like B&H, but you
see some of the photos and names and you get the picture)

<http://donwiss.com/pictures/brooklynstores/>

~~~
jscore
Yep, I live here too (and not in Williamsburg but closer to Brighton Beach).
Brooklyn is hustler's paradise. Some people I know do stuff online that will
make this guy look like an amateur.

------
chunkbot
My takeaways:

* Google (and competitors) Search is far from solved.

* Citi is a terrible bank. Big shocker.

* Amazon has awesome customer service, to the point of actually _deterring_ bad sellers.

~~~
sleight42
That was my biggest take-away: with caveat emptor, curation is critical!

Sadly, this article highlights an abysmal failure of government and the free
market -- with exception to Amazon.

------
staunch
Surely the consumer reporting sites are smart enough to add ref="nofollow"?

~~~
StavrosK
I know it's a bit pedantic, but it's a bit telling when you suggested it and
even you got "rel" wrong.

~~~
staunch
Thanks for pointing out the typo.

------
credo
dup of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945112> (see discussion there)

Interesting to see that this submission made it to #3 while the original
submission (same link - single page) isn't on the top page :)

~~~
petercooper
This submission has a far better title that's aligned with the typical HN
interests. It mentions Google and getting a business advantage.

Having seen people submit stories here with awful headlines and then wonder
why they didn't take off _so_ many times, it no longer surprises me that most
people can't write good titles..

~~~
tokipin
i thought submissions weren't supposed to be "editorialized"

~~~
petercooper
The guideline is: _You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put
gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it._

Writing a title to better fit the gamut of HN interests without making it
inaccurate/false/salacious isn't gratuitous and unlikely to be spin.

------
jrockway
This makes sense; people do not write positive reviews because there is no
incentive to do so. Negative reviews, though, you get to rant and be a savior,
so you are more motivated to write them. More buzz == more links == more
traffic.

What doesn't make sense, though, is that the banks don't care that their
Cardholders are being abused intentionally. That can't be good for their
business, so I'm surprised that they don't go after him. Physical threats and
fake lawsuits also sound like things that will get you into trouble. I have a
feeling that this "business model" is going to end with some time in prison,
which makes it questionably useful long-term.

The article claims that Amazon doesn't put up with this bullshit; why does
everyone else?

(I have half a mind to order some glasses from this guy just to get him to
threaten to sue me. It will be fun to show up in court and serve him with my
countersuit.)

------
frisco
And now he has parlayed his negative reviews into a New York Times article. I
can't imagine he'll still show up in Google results after this.

~~~
kingsidharth
A NY Times article will make Google love him more. You know, a link bank /
mention of URL from a high "PR" site.

Bugger just got away with more of what he was looking for - ranking in Google.

~~~
jrockway
I did the Google searches mentioned in the article and did not find anything
with the word "decor" in it on the first page of results.

~~~
llimllib
I did as well, and he was on the front page.

[http://img.skitch.com/20101128-f4iwgixrk3wi3pyxudw73r53xe.me...](http://img.skitch.com/20101128-f4iwgixrk3wi3pyxudw73r53xe.medium.jpg)

~~~
Matt_Cutts
Part of the problem is that [christian audigier glasses] is a difficult query.
Why? Because most of the content on christianaudigier.com is about clothes.
There's only a few pages about glasses, and even those pages don't seem to
have the word "glasses" on them. Instead, they almost exclusively use the word
"sunglasses." Here's the search results for [christian audigier sunglasses]
for example:

[http://www.mattcutts.com/images/christian-audigier-
glasses.p...](http://www.mattcutts.com/images/christian-audigier-glasses.png)

As you can see, the official website has three of the top four results in that
case. In essence, you're asking [brandname X] to return brandname.com when the
word X doesn't actually appear anywhere on site. That's fundamentally a hard
query. We have made progress on queries like that, and certainly folks at
Google are talking about how to do better on such queries in the future.

------
blntechie
Found this in the comments section of that article. So report to Amazon too
even though he has not broken rules there.

"FYI, an Amazon affiliate called "Eyewear Country", has the address of 56
Beaumont St. in Brooklyn, same as DecorMyEyes.com. Just an observation" -
Cindy's Master in Nytimes.com
[http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/1...](http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html?permid=21#comment21)

~~~
sitmack
They also have a newegg account,
[http://www.newegg.com/Mktplace/SellerProfile.aspx?SellerID=A...](http://www.newegg.com/Mktplace/SellerProfile.aspx?SellerID=A01Z)
it should be canceled.

------
cvg
He's even using Google Checkout. I'm surprised Google puts up with this.

~~~
cvg
Bravo Google! The google checkout button no longer leads to a checkout page,
but rather "Unfortunately, this merchant no longer accepts payments through
Google. We apologize for the inconvenience."

------
brown9-2
Perhaps a part of the overall solution (besides blaming search engines) is to
better educate the average consumer about buying expensive goods from
unfamiliar websites without first doing a little bit of research on their
reputation.

------
DannoHung
Google used to have this thing where you could promote and demote search
results. They got rid of it. I never understood why.

Ideally, Google's search results would include up votes/down votes like reddit
along with comments on the page.

~~~
egypturnash
Oooh, I can spend a few bucks on mechanicalturk (or some botnet cycles) to
promote my shady site to the top of search results. Sweet!

~~~
DannoHung
Simple solution: only track those google accounts with cell phone numbers on
file

~~~
eru
Why do you think that mturkers can't claim they have cellphones?

------
petercooper
The gist being that popularity algorithms (such as the supposedly deemphasized
PageRank) typically fail to distinguish between good and bad references.

------
martincmartin
It's interesting that a search mentioned in the article, "Christian Audigier
glasses," still shows DecorMyEyes near the top for Google. It's also near the
top for Bing

It's nowhere to be seen in Duck Duck Go.

Bing seems to just be copying Google, both its good and bad results, which is
disappointing. Given that everyone is optimizing for Google and not (as much)
for Bing, it shouldn't be hard for Bing to do better.

------
jscore
Genius.

+1 backlink from nytimes.com, a pr9 site.

~~~
spullara
I was blown away when I didn't find a nofollow in the source.

~~~
antifuchs
Also, this:

“Just throw in ‘designer eyeglasses,’ ‘designer eyewear’ and a couple
different brand names,” he says, “and I’m all set.”

All of which, they did. Shameful.

~~~
BrandonM
I think it's actually pretty brilliant on NYT's part. They're _forcing_ Google
to fix the problem instead of working around it like Google has asked everyone
else to do. This isn't Google's Internet; they don't get to tell us how to use
it. It's their job to take what's there and index it in a useful way.

------
ck2
It may take a few years but I look forward to reading about him getting a
prison sentence at some point.

He's obviously broken criminal, not just civil laws, they are just harder to
prove. One would be identity theft by calling credit card companies as other
people.

------
joe_the_user
Blaming Google sounds like a pathetic dodge. This fellow is a criminal who is
being ignored by the police.

That he gets Google hits or publicizes his scams otherwise is rather
secondary.

~~~
pessimizer
Seriously. The man has no fear of police, just connected people. That by
itself just makes the country that it happens in look bad, even if there was
no such thing as an internet.

This could have been a story about him gaming the Yellow Pages by getting 18
phone numbers and 18 business names in 18 sections, each name prefixed with 18
'a's.

All the internet assures is that his customers will get the product home
before checking it for quality, and that the customers are less likely to be
local - but that doesn't seem to intimidate him in the least.

Not that the story doesn't highlight a serious flaw in google's search, but
that's the least of the story for me.

------
danparsonson
I thought this, at the end of the article, was telling:

 _"The customer is always right - not here, you understand?" he says, raising
his voice. "I hate that phrase - the customer is always right. Why is the
merchant always wrong? Can the customer ever be wrong? Is that not possible?"_

I suspect (hope) that such a lack of imagination will ultimately curb his
success. You don't treat your customers well purely for your customers'
benefit...

------
joshu
I wonder if this is an attempt to mobilize 4chan.

~~~
daimyoyo
4chan would probably be on the side of the website owner. Unless someone's
harming a cute animal, they don't seem to care much about peoples plights.

------
nagrom
His behaviour is atrocious. I cannot imagine that I would be very happy about
him doing this to someone for whom I cared. If his location is easily
findable, I am amazed that no-one has enthusiastically gone to address his
behaviour in person, especially given that the 'authorities' don't seem to
care.

~~~
Estragon

      I am amazed that no-one has enthusiastically gone to address his 
      behaviour in person
    

Based on the limited sample in the article, it may be that he generally
targets women for this kind of harrassment.

------
j_baker
"The story of DecorMyEyes suggests that 15 years after the birth of online
commerce..."

I'm curious what caused them to choose 1995 as the birth of online commerce.
It wasn't paypal's founding. That was in 98.

~~~
seiji
Viaweb, obviously.

Wikipedia says amazon.com was founded both in 1994 and 1995.

Or maybe Windows 95?

~~~
btilly
The right starting date is 1993. Because that is when the first commercial
online site came online. However that company got sold to AOL in 1995. See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Network_Navigator> for details.

The second company to try to make money on the web was Netscape. It was
founded in 1994, however its IPO was in 1995. So that is two reasons why 1995
is important at the beginning of online commerce.

------
jemfinch
If he's actually sending images from Google earth through email, he's guilty
of copyright infringement, deserving of both civil and criminal penalties.

------
Xuzz
Horrible, but scarily brilliant.

------
arkitaip
You know, there is actually something WE can do. Yeah, _we_. It would be easy
to setup DecorMyEyesScams.tld and google bomb it to the top of google's SERPs.

~~~
Toucan
But you'd have to do that for each brand that he sells. It's not the
DecorMyEyes keyword that people are getting the "wrong" result for.

~~~
arkitaip
There are other ways. One could, for example, report the sites - there are
atleast two sites that are owned by the same jerk according to various sources
- to Google, Phishtank or Netcraft.

<http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/>
<http://www.phishtank.com/> <http://toolbar.netcraft.com/>

EDIT: You can also report them to McAfee Secure and Authorize.net. I don't
think they are happy about having a scamming merchant using their logos.

------
yanw
This case is an argument for the manual curation of the Google SERP.

~~~
frisco
No, this case is an argument for a focus on natural language processing and
sentiment analysis. The Google way would never involve manual curation, and
we'll get some cool NLP research out of it.

~~~
tgflynn
I would think that adding a dose of sentiment analysis to their algorithm
wouldn't be that hard. You could have a database of positive/negative terms
and use it to score web pages for positive/negative content. It might not be
very accurate but it seems like it could at least be used to make sure that
sites with lots of negative link parents don't make it to the top of the page.

------
T_S_
This article is reads like an ad for the semantic web.

~~~
joshu
Sigh. No, semweb is about the semantics of schema.

~~~
T_S_
Feasibility aside, that's a pretty narrow definition.

