Reply All - #40 The Flower Child

Episode Date: September 22, 2015

Ripoff Report is one of the original complaint websites. It’s basically the work of one person, a man whom the internet describes as a kind of mythical villain, a Keyser Söze who wields power from behind his janky website. Reply All producer Sruthi Pinnamaneni visits his bunker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm Alex Goldman. This week's story comes from our producer, Shruthy Pinnameney, and it's a story about one person. Someone who's earned a reputation online that's sinister, monolithic, and malevolent. Someone who wields an extraordinary amount of power. All from one antiquated website. Here's Shruthi. So a couple of weeks ago, I drove to a small town in upstate New York to meet this woman.

Hi. Hi. Marissa. Yes. Marissa Hernandez. She's a 20-year-old taxidermist. She lives in an old clapboard house with her mom, a bunch of pets, and she works out of a bedroom piled high with dead animals.

No, there's coyotes, foxes, there's a cougar in there. The kind of taxidermy she makes, I've never seen before. These animals are soft, meaning they're filled with teddy bear stuffing, and they're cuddly. People like to hold them and touch them and they think it's the coolest experience. You know, it's great. Anybody can mount something and make it look like an animal, but I feel like it takes actual talent to make something look like it's breathing, you know, it's still there, you know. Marissa's all in on taxidermy.

She dropped out of college to focus on it. She's been selling her work online. Collectors have been buying from her. She won her first taxidermy contest this year. And then last month, she hit her first big roadblock. It's on the internet. What are you typing in? My business name, which is Vito Nova Taxonomy.

And right... You type it in and write on the first page. Yeah, a couple of them down. You can see the report. The most prominent search result, it's even above Marissa's own company website, is a link to something called Rip-Off Report. Here's what the website looks like.

There's a big screaming red headline that says, Complaint. Then there's a map with a red pin showing Marissa's home address. Below it, more big red text. It says, Vita Nova taxidermy, Marissa Hernandez, severe misrepresentation of product, unfriendly customer service,

blackmails those who complain. Then there's a very detailed complaint, dated August 20th, 2015. The quality of taxidermy mounts, as shown on Vianovas website, are not in any way the same quality of products she sends to her clients. Mounds have arrived with multiple holes in the skin,

poor detail work, The accusations don't stop there. According to this website, Marissa has committed untold sins against taxidermy. Like selling a kangaroo. That's illegal in New York. Marissa Hernandez has been anything but professional. This is a business to stay away from. You're sort of calm about it.

Is that how you feel? No, I mean, it's just how I come off. I'm very sensitive as a person. And it's these kind of things that definitely get to me on a different kind of level. You feel it like in your stomach and it's, you know, it's a horrible kind of feeling. Almost all of Marissa's business is online. Since the rip-off report appeared, she hasn't got a single new order, nothing. Marissa says there's nothing in the report that's true.

We went through it point by point, and she had an answer for each one. No, she never sold a kangaroo. She feels like she's always been polite with her customers, showed me a bunch of exchanges where she resolved issues with them. but the point is she knows exactly who wrote this. It's a young taxidermist that she knows from a taxidermy forum, someone who chose to call herself a nony mouse in the ripoff report. So why would somebody go after you like this?

It's no other reason except for a personal issue with me because they haven't done business with me at all. They haven't dealt with me. I think it's definitely a competition issue. And if somebody else does it better, you don't like that they're taking customers away. I emailed Anonymous, but she didn't want to talk. I asked her if she could send me anything to back up the claim she made on the report, but she politely declined.

Marissa also emailed her through a friend, and Anonymous did relent, and emailed Ripoff report saying, hey, I changed my mind. Can you make this go away? But nothing happened. So then Marissa wrote Ripoff an email, explained her situation, and asked. I would like to know how I can have this report changed or deleted and what information I can provide to you to prove this action. wrong. I'd also like to at least have my address removed because it is my personal home address and I live with family. That is both threatening and scary and something I would not like publicly displayed. Thank you, Marissa Hernandez. That was a month ago. No response yet. As a last-ditch effort, she called them. Oh, good. Marissa Hernandez. Marissa Hernandez. Hi. I'm looking to discuss ways

to get a report removed from your website. Can you hear me now? No, you don't know up on me. Marissa tried calling back again and again and again, but nobody picked up. Taxidermy was Marissa's only source of income, and now it's gone. Her business is young, and she doesn't have a stable of clients to rely on. And she's young, too. She just turned 20 last month. You know, my whole life, I haven't really been that great at anything, but then I found something that I was actually good at,

and it's something I wanted to keep doing because, you know, it's all I really know how to do as well as I can do. It shocks me a little bit because I don't know if this is going to be on my page forever and I may have to just give up the business and then, you know, because my name will be tarnished for the rest of my life and I couldn't continue because I won't get customers or I'll have to change my name or. It's so crazy. You're 20 and you're like having to think about changing your name. Yeah, it's not a fun thing to think about. Before this, Marissa had never heard of ripoff report, nor had I. But it turns out. out it's a huge deal. It contains almost two million reports. A lot of them are what you'd expect on a complaint website. I purchased a couch, it ripped, and the furniture store refused to fix it.

There's warnings about internet scams, mean store employees. I talked to dozens of people for this story who, like Marissa, say that rip-off reports about them are false and damaging. One guy at a law firm told me his company had been accused of sexual harassment, but also of impotence. A doctor told me that she cried for months. because of a report that was completely false. They were all still scared of rip-off report, even years later. And this might sound a little dumb, but it never really occurred to me before this

how much a person's livelihood depends on their online reputation. It's because of that vulnerability that there's this whole ecosystem of services that promised to clean up the aftermath of a rip-off report. Tyler enjoyed a successful career running his own private practice. Until one day, however, Tyler does, discovered that an unhappy patient of his published a fictitious and offensive post about his practice on ripoffreport.com.

There are tons of videos like this on YouTube, all sorts of companies with names like internet reputation.com or reputation management.com. And within no time, the company managed to eliminate any trace of the unhappy patient's post, leaving Tyler to focus on more important things like his retirement. And the crazy thing about this website, Ripoff Report, that all these people are battling, It's pretty much the work of one man. Ed Madgetson. Ed's the one who picked up when Marissa called.

The people I talked to had all sorts of stories about him. They say he lives in a bunker. He's on the run from the FBI. He's a sociopath, a pedophile. It sounded to me like they were describing some kind of mythical villain. Like if Kaiser Soze did his evil through a janky website. A month ago, I met Ed. And for all the things I'd heard about Ed Madgitson,

the man that I met was way. more surprising. Coming up after the break, we head to the bunker. And now, back to the show. Before the break, Shruthi was about to meet the man behind Ripoff report. I reached Ed Madgitzen through his former PR person. Ed called me, and pretty soon he said he'd do an interview. I could visit him in Arizona.

You have to tell me, you're in New York. Yeah. What's that? Your bird? Once or us. Oh, okay. I met Ed in the suburbs of Phoenix. He's 60-something with long curly hair and glasses,

dresses like someone who spends a lot of time hunched over a computer, T-shirt, track pants. He has eight cell phones, at least that's how many it counted. And he's with a dog, a dark mutt called Buddy. Buddy is always by his side. You don't mind sitting in the back door gets front. He's talking to me, not Buddy. The dog sat shotgun.

Ed drove to his house, a rancher. style spot tucked away in the hills. It is beautiful here with all the cacti and like fuse of the mountains. And we're not ready to get out here. Hold on. There were lots of trees, a small pool, small waterfall. Not exactly the bunker that people told me he lived in. But it did have a lot of security. Wow, that's a lot of cameras.

That's four times of 16 cameras. It actually has one that actually gets license plates and so on. Have you ever had an actual issue? Like somebody trying to... I've had issues. Like somebody trying to break in? Not break in, but I'd much rather not say it this time. I was going to put a moat.

A moat? I'm kidding with you. Ed told me his long path to rip-off report started back in 1970, when he was just a stoner teenager, helping out a florist near his school. A supplier had just brought a fresh batch of flowers and left them on the sidewalk. Ed was trying to put them away,

but people kept stopping him, asking to buy the flowers. I said to myself, she was, you know, maybe I can put flowers out on a corner in just a few spots and sell those flowers. So you mean instead of having like a store

to just have a person selling it like out of a bucket or something? Correct. Ed hired a bunch of his hippie friends, handed each one some flowers in a bucket, and the business took off. Ed says he earned his first million before he was 19. I just kept going and opening up more stores.

There wasn't very much to the store. What was their name of the business? The Flower Children. I read a bunch of old articles about the Flower Children. In the photos, you see Ed with a long curly ponytail. There's young women and ripped up denim. They're sitting cross-like on the pavement under his signature red and yellow umbrellas, next to pails of carnations and daisies.

So how did he go from this to rip-off report? Turns out, flowers are a dirty, dirty business. Ed says people were constantly trying to shut him down. Floris, zoning inspectors. With the flower business and all my experience there helped me because I suffered the injustices of the system. And even though I always won, always. I always persuaded the city council members,

you know, and they bought it for a hearing or whatever. We always won and were always able to end up selling off lunch. hours. Ed started a string of businesses after that, and each time he'd end up in a different fight, a different legal battle. He says he always ran into some big vested interest trying to stamp out the little guy. And Ed always fights back, not for the money, he says, but because he cares about justice. Like for instance, when he was in his 40s, Ed was semi-retired, living in Tempe, Arizona. He was spending his free time camped out in a lawyer's office. He would answer the phone, and if it was someone whose case was too small for the lawyer, then he, Ed, would help

that person. Here's one call he took. Old guy is probably in his 80s. They bought a pickup truck, got ripped off for his deposit, and the guy wasn't going to budge. So I set up a picket with him and his wife and other people and handed flyers out to people. And at the time, I actually used the word, rip-off. You used the word rip-off in the flyer. In the flyer and on a big piece of oak tag. And it said, honk if they ripped you off too. So people were just hunking. And they knew this is what the sign said. So every time the people honked, they cringed inside because it was people saying, yeah, I got ripped off too. And how did you feel when they were honking? It was a blast. It was a blast. the area where we were picketing wasn't far from where something else I was doing.

There were some people that needed to paint around my parents' home. So I went and picked up some day laborers, and then they were telling me about how they get ripped off. People worked them and then drop them off, leave them, and they threaten them with deportation and all kinds of other things. So these are like illegal immigrant workers, like day laborers? Workers that are the people who do all lawns and pay. our fruit, because I am a firm believer that they should come here legally, but we've allowed

it, and our American system has allowed them to survive for this long and look the other way. Now, all of a sudden, let's deport them all. Totally crazy. But they were telling you a story of how... I'm going to be back on track. Remember, ADD? Okay. That is the first to admit that he often gets sidetracked. So I made up a flyer. You're the king of flyers. So I made up a flyer that tell them what they should do and don't spit in the street.

Don't whistle at women, don't urinate in public. Some rules to follow, so the police would leave them alone. At the bottom, there's a phone number. If a landlord or anyone else is messing with you, call me, and I'll help you for free. So Ed's working with these day laborers, with the people calling the lawyer's office, and he's falling in love with being the vigilante. And then someone suggested, why don't you start a website? Now, when I heard about computers, trust me, I said, I'm never going to get into computers.

It's not happening. Why? You know, I dropped out of 10th grade, so I wasn't a speller. I wasn't, couldn't really put too many sentences together. It was a chore to teach me because I was really a dumb shit. But Ed jumped in, hired someone to build him a website. I first registered as bad business bureau.com, but spelled the word bureau incorrectly. It was that way for six months until somebody somewhere said, do you realize you're spelling

the word bureau wrong? I totally freaked. It was 1998 and the site was an immediate hit. Thousands come here to sound off on a scam and send it bouncing down the corridors of the information superhighway. Talking about scams that are scrooging thousands. thousands of dollars from the unsuspecting buyer. It's called ripoffreport.com. The internet didn't yet have horns that could honk at local businesses.

Ripoff report filled that role nicely. Anyone could come here, write a post for free. And they'd be heard, partly because ripoff report is a perfect fit for the Google algorithm. First, the site is great at using all the right words in all the right places. Words like review and complaint. Words that would typically be searched alongside a business name. And second, a lot of these small businesses don't have much of a web presence anyway, so a rip-off report would jump to the top of their results.

All of which means if you write a rip-off report about someone, a lot of people will probably see it. But here's what really makes rip-off report unique. Under no circumstances, is a report removed? That's Ed's policy, and he sticks to it. Do you ever have a situation where you feel, oh, you need to remove the original report? rip-off report can't play judge and jury. We can't get involved.

You know, it's, you never know. You know, that scale of justice, you know, with the blind lady and stuff like that, justice is blind, and everyone's entitled to their opinion. Ed says he refuses to give anyone special treatment. In his mind, that's what separates him from those other websites like munkshots.com, where if you pay, they'll take content down. For Ed, the permanence is what makes rip-off report fair. It's been like that since the beginning.

There was a big break company, I won't mention any names, offered me $50,000 to remove reports. And I said, no. At the time, you know, I was just paying for this out of my own pocket and I felt that I was doing something good. And I could have just kept kind of doing. that and, you know, making money on the money that I had. You had no revenue, like no ads, nothing back then?

Nothing. Okay. Nothing. Yeah, I didn't want to take advertising on the website. But I had to because I was forced into it because of these, you know, knuckleheads that I have to deal with. So I got to charge more for our service. By knuckleheads, he means the people who keep suing him for stuff on his website.

According to him, they're the ones who forced him to start making money off of rip-off report. He's had to pay over $5 million in legal fees. He's been sued more than 100 times. Ed always wins because there's a law that came out in the 90s, which says a website owner isn't responsible for what other people write on it. It's the law that protects Facebook, Google, Twitter, and it also protects Ed. But still, it's expensive. And so Ed says, to cover costs, He's added stuff to his website. Ads an arbitration program and my favorite, a corporate advocacy program. The corporate advocacy, business remediation, and customer satisfaction program.

Yes, it's a long name for a program that does a lot for both consumers and businesses alike. Think of it as a VIP room of Ripoff Report. If you join, Ed will send someone to check out your company and write a long spiel about how great it is. a spiel which will be placed well above any negative report about you. And then, if someone tries to file a new report about you, Ed will put that person in touch with you right away. You work it out with them. As long as the customer is satisfied, the report never posts.

It's as if you've inoculated yourself against rip-off. It'll cost, though. Look, the average is probably between $5,500 and $15 to $20,000. But there's a lot of work that's involved with it. people think it's just like nothing. The people I talk to, this is why they call Ed an extortionist. They see it as Ed using Rip-Off Report to shake them down. Some people I talked to said, if they could just get their hands on Ed, they would kill him.

Ring his neck. Ed gets so many threatening calls that he has a favorite section on the Rip-Off Report website, like a Hall of Fame. He showed me a couple on his computer. A lot of folders called threats. These are different crazy nut jobs. How about that one? Threatening and nasty emails and phone calls, 1068 messages. He's chuckling there.

Messages like this don't seem to hurt Ed. He actually seems to feed off of them. They're proof that he's doing the right thing. I feel bad for people, you know, because I always feel like... Can I just say something? What kind of person calls like that? She just sounds like somebody. She must have done something to somebody.

Who the hell knows? She could have stolen something. Her kid could have done something. Who knows? But what I really wanted Ed to talk about is the people who hadn't done anything wrong. People had been hurt by his website. But to get to that, I'd have to first get him to say, yes, innocent people like Marissa the taxidermist do get targeted on ripoff report. And that is really, really hard. I just say in general, nobody just picked their name out in a phone book and said,

gee whiz, I'm going to file a nasty ripoff report. I just, so what do you want me to know if I feel bad about things like that? I don't know, do you? Well, I don't know. Does the company of any of the search engines feel bad about that? The way Ed sees it, the world is changing and he's just keeping up. Life is it fair, and we all have to suffer with certain things that do happen. This is just a way of the 21st century.

It's no longer just buyer beware. It's more so seller beware. And businesses need to be more customer service conscious and be, have a good attitude. But what if it's a company that really didn't? Number one, it would never happen to somebody like you. There are people that are out there that are literally assholes and they deserve what they're getting. Nobody writes a rip-off report for no reason. Say some jerk says there's this nice guy down the street.

I'm going to file a terrible report about him. And it costs the jerk nothing to file the report and say the nice guy, he has to pay for something like corporate advocacy, which is, you know, it's pretty expensive, like for most businesses, five grand. If you questioned most of the businesses, they would tell you it was the best thing that ever happened. But can you imagine a scenario where it is unfair, like, especially if the nice guy couldn't afford it? You know, if it didn't happen here, it was going to happen somewhere. This went on for a while. Basically, Ed's saying we're all going to get complaints, no matter how hard we try. If you tell Ed, yeah, but what if you're not guilty?

He'll say, well, you're probably guilty. And if you say, no, really, I'm innocent, he'll say, life's not fair. And what he does is no different than what Google does. He's just the middleman. And Ed says, think of all the good that Ripoff Report does. I have talked to the FBI to attorneys general in different things. States. And they say, yeah, they do look at sites like a rip-off report to find victims of companies that may be scamming people. As much as people like to try to put us out to be the bad guy,

and all those like nasty little websites that people write about us about me, they don't know me. They take things, change them around, switch it to something else. And there's people just out there that just want to lie and tell stories. They're like trying to give me some of my own medicine. But you know what? I'll take it. I've been dealing with it. Is it aggravating? Is it stressful? Sure. Look at me. I've done nothing but gain weight over the years because I'm a slave to the computer. I'm not taking care of myself in the name of I'm just so dedicated to making this thing right. And I ain't making a lot of fucking money. And people think it's all about money that I'm making all this money. I mean, it's mind boggling the crap that people say.

But hey, I got to live by the sword? What's the saying? I live and die by the sword. Maybe I'm the world's biggest sucker, but I actually do find Ed convincing when he says he's not in it for the money. Because there are really only three things that Ed ever wants to talk about. His dog, his bird, and the fight. Ed's always coming back to this, the fight,

the little guy being screwed over by big, powerful forces. And in this fight, Ed always casts himself as the hero. It can't be any other way. And it definitely looks like this fight has taken a lot out of him. He's single, doesn't make time for relationships. He's incredibly secretive about random things. Like, when he was ordering pizza at one point, he asked me not to record. He didn't want anyone to know what restaurant he orders from.

He won't leave his garbage out in case his enemies find DNA of him. and the house we're sitting in, it's empty. Ed recently moved out into some other undisclosed location. He says he's had to because somebody doxed him, publish his address online. How did you feel when you saw that? I felt, you know, disappointed, and of course I was pissed off. I'm really concerned for my dog and my bird. So, you know, that's, I'm not concerned about the furniture and the other personal effects.

I've moved since I've had the website, I believe eight or nine times. Do you ever enjoy it in a way? Like, it's an adventure, like kind of moving from one undisclosed location to another. It's kind of like a spy movie. Wrong answer. No, no way. Doesn't not even close. No, of course not.

Oh, please. Are you kidding? It's a fucking pain in the ass to move. There's nothing else I could say. Do you ever think that maybe you're doing this to hide from something else? else. Like, like, if you didn't have rip-off report and you didn't have the eight cell phones, being cautious and all this other stuff, that if it was just you, that it would be really, really hard. Can we just hold off a second? Because I don't, I can't do certain things I can't

ignore. It's just sorry. My bird needs to get its beak trim. Oh, your bird needs to get a speak trend. So you're reminding yourself to. So. Can I help you? This happened a lot with Ed. We spent almost two days talking, and often, just when I felt like we were getting somewhere, the world would swoop in and distract him. For those two days, Ed was always gracious, seemed trusting, like a sweet uncle.

But when it was time for me to leave, you should take care. When you come describing me, I still have a good head of hair or left on me. Got to go through fact-checking. Well, are you going to take care? No photos. No photos. I really am glad you came. I'll see how you destroy me and misrepresent me.

He was joking, sort of. As I was walking out, I had this thought. Ed's philosophy seems to be that anyone he meets could be the next person who takes advantage of him, screws him over. That's how Ed sees the world. And that's why he's so sure that no matter how awful the sight makes his life or anyone else's, the world will always need rip-off report. Shruthy Pinnaminani is a producer for our show.

Reply all is hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. We were produced this week by Tim Howard, Shruthy Penamenni and Fia Bennon, and we were edited by Peter Clowney. Production assistance from Kalila Holt. Our engineer is Rick Kwan. Special thanks to Doug Pierce. Matt Lieber is that cousin you only see during the summer,

but you get along as though you hang out all the time. Our theme music is by the mysterious brakemaster cylinder, and our ad music is by Build Building. You can find more episodes at iTunes.com slash replyall. Our website is replyall.com. Thanks for listening.