John I appreciate the detailed discourse explaining these types of matters.
Re defining “specialize”… in other words defined:
take on such cases as being experts in. I am accustomed due line of work, using the terms “specialize” or “specialties”,
being a matter of the firm’s expertise, though being broad in other things & interest in that type of case. I appreciate it.
Please see below of what we know, or believe to know.
You are not likely to find a law firm which would "specialize" in one particular form of the general class of online defamation, trade disparagement, or other types of causes of action that might arise from a fraudulent review.
It's sort of like asking for a law firm that specializes in parking tickets. You may find law firms that do various automobile related things like license suspensions, DUI's, reckless driving citations, accidents, and so on.
Pretty much any law firm that handles internet related stuff, myself included, would be appropriate.
In this instance, its unclear by "fraudulent review website matters" you mean to suggest that (a) someone is posting fraudulent reviews to a legitimate review website, or (b) someone is running a fraudulent website posing as a legitimate review website.
** Seems to be (b), or a mix of b with legitimate postings? We do not know. There are vast amounts of comments/talk online, such as on Trustpilot (given the fraud site 1.5 stars), Google, on FB, etc. that the site is a fraud…. To give you an idea, there is a comment online that a site owner contacted the subject reviews site regarding a post in which the site owner never dealt/sold anything to such person/people.. with a response back from the subject review site, “in order to take down the review, it would cost them $99.” Buying out a fake review??…this is extortion. I contacted via internal email, as their support method only seems to be a contact page via email, no phone number. I asked on how they vet their postings, process.. as they declare all over the place: “authentic client reviews” & “xxx xxx trust in business with reviews of over xxx”. The fake review site never contacted me back to explain their procedure(s) to verify/vett, the legitimacy of the review.
Guessing that you might mean (a) instead of (b), there are a lot of questions that follow, such as where is this website run and by whom, which will have a lot to do with where, if push comes to shove, legal action of some kind might be appropriate.
Secondly, if it is a legitimate review website, but someone is posting a "fraudulent review" then, in general, the website operator is going to be legally protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, under which the providers of online services to which another person may communicate, are immune from any sort of liability under which the claim seeks to hold the provider of the online service responsible as the speaker. In other words, if I post on Namepros that
@bmugford is a poopy-head, then he can't sue Namepros for that - if it was a defamatory statement (which I'll get to below). He has to sue me.
On forums where people use aliases, then you typically would go after an anonymous "John Doe" defendant, subpoena the forum operator for their log files, subpoena the ISP for the IP address information corresponding to the time in question, and eventually follow that trail to the eventual user, if you don't already know who posted the information. As you might appreciate, that's a time-consuming process, is not by any means cheap, and may eventually crap out through a VPN or other offshore provider. So, whatever is causing you headaches with the "fraudulent review" had better be worth it, because doing that sort of things is no small task.
There can be other ways of dealing with the situation, depending on the type of website we're talking about, what their policies might be, whether you know who posted the "fraudulent review" etc..
I referred to a "defamatory statement" above, which is usually an untrue statement of fact causing economic damage to the subject of it, or something so far out of line that it amounts to defamation per se. From my own experience dealing with such matters, I can tell you that the overwhelming majority of statements that people think are "defamatory' are not, under US law. For example, take calling someone a "poopy-head". It sounds bad, but is it a factual assertion of some kind? I don't think so. It sounds more like a matter of opinion. People in the US are free to express their opinions.
Now, there are some practical considerations there. For example, there is a difference between saying, "Bob is a crook" and saying "I think Bob is a crook because I didn't get what I considered to be the full value of what I paid him." The first one says that Bob is a criminal of some kind. The second one is an opinion based on a subjective belief that the person did not get value for their money.
One other thing to bear in mind is that while one might find a negative review annoying, what can be doubly annoying is going after the person in question with legal process, and thus (a) giving the review more attention than it might have gotten in the first place, and/or (b) motivating the person in question to do even
more of the same thing.
For a demonstration of "(a)", there is currently a NASA scientist who has been trying, for a couple of years, to pursue a lawsuit against Tucows, Namesilo, Dynadot and GoDaddy over things that were posted about him on various "slander sites" discussed below. He filed the suit in 2000 and has been sort of floundering around with it for a while. The registrars are defendants because the slander sites used those registrars for various domain names - pretty much all of which have since lapsed and the sites have gone away. However, even though the sites are mostly long gone, his lawsuit is now one of the top search results for his name, and if you look at the filings in the lawsuit, you can read his own filings which repeat the slander against him. So, really, the only reason anyone can read the terrible things that were written about him is because he has made sure it will live forever in search results because of his lawsuit.
That sort of thing is called the "Barbara Streisand Effect" after the noted celebrity who sued in a vain attempt to keep aerial photographs of her property out of a general scientific database of an aerial survey of the California coastline. Becuase of her lawsuit, lots of news outlets and websites found the picture of her property and published it.
** Following facts:
- The reviewers on the subject fraud site are fictitious names.. we never dealt with such names. There are other site owners who have stated online, that they have had the same experience. Never had the reviewer as a customer.
- The reviews left, were one 1 star. They created fictitious reviews (one sentence a piece), one for each site.
- They targeted two of our sites.
- Only Google seems to have picked up these fake reviews, and are displaying them with some of our products results. We do not see any other search engines showing these reviews, were our products come up.
- We filed a report with Google. Seems they reviewed it, said they will disconnect the reviews from Google. After few days, nothing has changed.
- Seems the subject review site’s origin is Ukraine.
But if by "fraudulent review website" you mean that the website is itself fraudulent in some way, then that's another kettle of fish. There are, for example, smear sites which operate on the principle of having people post awful stuff, or generating awful stuff about people, posting it on the site, and then referring you to some kind of "reputation management" operation which will charge fees for claiming to be able to remove the stuff. Unsurprisingly, it can turn out that the "reputation management" company is related to the website operator, and the basic idea is that they are monetizing people getting upset about atrocious stuff being posted about them online.