
SEO Company CEO Contracts Murderers to Kill Competition, Client Exposes All - dETAIL
https://medium.com/@theplasticsurgeon/david-phillips-nkp-murderer-hn-66f19d89a341
======
louprado
I had a nasty bout with an SEO marketer a few years ago. He had taken content
from my website and other assets of mine without permission or advance
request. I was willing to overlook it as an inevitable cost of doing business.

But when he started to steal my customer reviews word for word and posting
them as fake reviews, I became irate. I guess I am OK with someone stealing
from me but I felt the reviews were my customer's property, not mine. When I
confronted him he started spamming my business and then wrote detailed fake
blog posts about how I was criminal hacker that now works covertly for the
FBI. My name and photoshopped images were posted on gay websites for bondage
sex. I Googled very poorly for a while, especially my images. I lost many many
nights of sleep over this and I probably lost a contract over it.

I eventually found where he lived and fortunately he owned his own home. I
threatened to sue him and take his home. He removed all the libelous posts
shortly after that.

After all had been settled, a few months later he wrote me asking if I wanted
to partner with him on a project, demonstrating a pathological lack of
awareness. Apparently tormenting me had just been another fun day at the
office and not a memorable event. I ignored him and never heard back.

My personal experience does make me wonder if the subject in the parent
article was motivated to _kill_ his competitors just for profit. Or did he and
his competitors have had a nasty on-going personal war that just kept
escalating. Not that I would ever justify attempted murder. Just saying...

edits: grammar, clarity.

~~~
danmaz74
Out of curiosity, why didn't you report these facts to the authorities? Fear
of wasting time, or of retaliation, or something else?

~~~
strathmeyer
Not everyone is rich.

~~~
danmaz74
I was talking about reporting a criminal case, not suing. With criminal cases
it's the State which pays for everything, I think?

~~~
CodeWriter23
In my experience, having had two former employees of my mom’s shop and a
strong arm robber arrested, it came down to me handing the police work to the
detectives. The other complaints we filed, just to name one, another employee
stealing inventory from mom’s shop in Manhattan and selling it to a vintage
shop in Brooklyn went nowhere because we didn’t have surveillance in the store
showing she stole it despite there being surveillance in the other shop
showing she sold it. Or the time I caught a kid red handed with my bike, and
the cops wouldn’t do anything because I didn’t have a bill of sale despite my
ability to describe the bike and it’s serial number. They gave me the kid’s
address and said if I demanded my bike back and he gave it to me, I could keep
it. The kid was running a bicycle chop shop in his garage.

So yeah, if you want the cops to close a case, you need to help them and that
costs money. Unless you get lucky and everything is obvious and the case
closes itself. Or in case of a murder. They tend to actually put resources
into solving murders. Or anything where they can reasonably seize loot. But
property theft or damage doesn’t really register.

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franze
>... does very little to enhance our web presence in the first place and then
never does anything further to improve our results. Complaints are met with
excuses. In other words, ... ... a company that makes false promises and
delivers little value.

SEO agencies in a nutshell.

Disclaimer: I'm a SEO.

~~~
jlebrech
digital snake-oil, idiots will always fall for it.

~~~
franze
well, sometimes it's even a more or less sophisticated scam (blaming it on
idiots is too short sighted)

a simple blueprint of the most common seo scam:

1) sell them something external that does not create additional work for the
client and assign value to it i.e.: links, linkbuilding services, tools, ...

2) disable feedack loops (it takes x month until you see an impact, introduce
"magic numbers" seo tools)

3) wait & take money (a.k.a. deplete ressources that the client might use for
otherwise improvement)

4) trigger value creating project i.e.: better targeted title tags,
sitemap.xml, responsive, webperformance, ...

5) see immidiate benefits

6) assign impact to 1)

7) addiction / lock-in cycle completed

~~~
shostack
Except some of those things are legit. It can in fact take multiple months to
see real movement in the SERPs. Value is added by fixing tagging and such.

There are a lot of snake oil salesmen just like in and industry, but some of
these things don't belong on that list.

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rdtsc
Coming from a post-Soviet period, I am surprised a bit that this doesn't
happen more often. Company owners would be killed seemingly without much worry
if they crossed anyone powerful.

I was doing homework one night and felt the house shake, I thought it was an
earthquake. It turns out a bomb went off in a 5 story apartment building
nearby. Someone was trying to kill a banker so they left a bomb by their door.

~~~
jondubois
Yes, I'm surprised how celebrities and CEOs of big corporations live so
long... In spite of the bodyguards.

It's hard to appreciate the sheer number of people that exist in the world...
Surely there are enough crazy people to populate an entire city.

Is it possible that intelligence is inversely correlated with insanity? I
thought it was the opposite.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
There's only about 8k people who are 1 in 1k crazy and 1 in 1k capable,
assuming independent traits.

If you restrict that to even 1 in 20 violent, then you're talking 400 people
world wide.

Factor out kids, elderly, etc and you're talking 200 really scary
motherfuckers. Figure 75% are employed by governments, and you're talking 50
rogue badasses -- which seems vaguely in line with the number of really
dangerous terrorists, paramilitaries, etc.

My guess is that the number of people that are both interested and capable of
the things you propose are busy making tons of cash on drugs, terrorist
violence elsewhere, etc.

~~~
zafka
Can you explain how you came up with these numbers? Intuitively I have always
thought they were low, due to the small incidence of terrorist attacks, but I
am curious to where you come up with your base numbers.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
I made them up.

But they're reasonable bounds -- the number of terrorists are very low, we
know this for a fact. So we should suspect that the contributing traits are
relatively rare. And if we want to talk about people who really _scare_ us,
then it should be people who are real outliers.

An NFL player is a one in a few hundred thousand, and an NFL star is around
one in a million. So if we're looking for the Tom Brady of terrorists, it
would make sense that we don't want a fraction substantially higher than the
number of Tom Brady's in football players.

So I cut off a segment of the population that would have the traits required
and estimated how large it was -- 99.9th percentile capable, 99.9th percentile
crazy, 95th percentile violent. (Intuitively -- if the smartest and craziest
kid in your high school were the same kid (1 in 1000 each trait), then you
picked the most violent in 20 of those kids.)

This turns out to be ~400 people, which seems ballpark right. I'd certainly
expect the answer to be in the 120-1,200 person range.

As long as your estimates aren't _too_ far off and you aren't systemically
wrong (eg, always rounding down), estimating is usually a reasonably accurate
method to get a feel for the scale of something.

------
1_2__4
I don’t know which is worse, the story topic or Medium’s floating “open in
app” desperate plea.

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
What is worse?

    
    
        [ ] Medium’s floating “open in app" desperate plea
        [x] Someone hiring a killer to kill his competitor
    

My pleasure.

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notjustanymike
Read the article!

"Victim-1 and PHILLIPS were former business partners and are currently
business competitors."

It's not like he's offing SEO competitors at random. He knew and worked with
the victim personally.

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stephengillie
Reminiscent of laser eye surgeon Mockovak putting a hit on his business
partner and fellow laser eye surgeon King. [0]

[0] [http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Renton-laser-eye-
surg...](http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Renton-laser-eye-surgeon-
sentenced-in-1225540.php)

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fellellor
So the government caught this guy in a Sting. What would even motivate such an
operation? I have heard of Traps being laid out for potential pedophiles, drug
addicts etc. Buy why would they go after this kind of criminal preemptively?

~~~
grumio
FTA: "The investigation revealed that PHILLIPS engaged another individual, who
has since become a cooperating defendant (“CD-1”), to commit a murder of an
identified victim (“Victim-1”)"

As I read it, the potential hitman became a defendant after Phillips attempted
to hire him. The potential hitman wasn't LE or on LE's side before that.

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taprun
I was very suspicious when I read the article. It didn't seem to link to any
government websites or newspapers, but I did find a story about the activity
in the LA Times [0].

[0] [http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ceo-murder-
for-h...](http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ceo-murder-for-
hire-20170605-story.html)

~~~
hnaccy
It links to court document.

------
_Codemonkeyism
Today one would think Tor and Bitcoin to be involved.

But no - classic meeting with the killer and handing over a (faked) image of
the victim.

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diebir
The scariest part here is that surgeons are concerned with being "marketing
experts". Single payer.

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allan_golds
Non closable pop-up window.

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tptacek
Surely he knew the photograph was fake, and just engaged in this transaction
to send a message to his competition.

~~~
ceejayoz
I'm sure Homeland Security can gin up a convincing-looking murder scene photo.

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lithos
SEO is dirtier than I thought.

~~~
it_learnses
I'm not sure we can blame an entire industry because of one sociopath.

~~~
gsich
>SEO >industry

Snakeoil is more like it.

