RipoffReport.com Lies?

Alright, yeah, I know it’s Friday and I’m supposed to be giving you the 7 Things I Learned on the Interweb This Week, and I will. Well, I hope to.  See, as I was putting together the 7, I was looking into a post by Wingnut about how to use RipoffReport.com against your competition.  Ah, yes, the good ol’ Ripoff Report.  Lot’s of fun there.  Remember when they had that listing from some random teenage girl who had her boobs ogled by Sergey Brin and then he called up his buddy Larry to join them for some milkshakes or something?  I sure as hell do, so I was going to include it.

The damndest thing happened.  First of all, I actually made an effort to see if I could find the report.  As we all know, not only did RipoffReport.com not invent the internet, they also claim to never erase reports.  So surely a juicy tidbit like Sergey Brin checking out the mamams of teenager would still be there.  After all, they say they win every lawsuit, so surely the mega-rich, Big Brotherly co-founder of Google would be in there, right?  Well, not so much.  My Ripoff Report search yielded only three reports for Sergey Brin.  None of them mentioned staring at boobs.  None of them mentioned breasticles at all.

So, knowing that I wrote something about it, I searched my results and found I did  mention it in a 7 from January.  Sure as shit, I followed the link, and sure as shit I found the report.  Only . . . Sergey Brin mysteriously disappeared from the report and it was about some “Soney Bonoi”.  Huh?  What the fuck?  Where the hell did one of my favorite Russians go and who the hell is this Soney Bonoi?  Further reading led to the conclusion that all instances of “Sergey Brin” were swapped with “Soney Bonoi”.  The question is why?

As someone who hates doing research, and I’ve done too much already, this leads me to a couple of conclusions as to why Ripoff Report fixed this.  First, RipoffReport.com, which, in my opinion, are like grand-standing asshole bullies with their whole “we never lose a lawsuit bitch!” posturing,  are afraid of lawsuits, assuming the suing party has the money to grind them into the ground and changed it to get them off the radar.  But, instead of deleting the report, in order to save face and not lose their thug street cred, simply did a ctrl+h and changed “Sergey Brin” to “Soney Bonoi”.  They can still say they don’t delete reports, they get a potential lawsuit from a big money plaintiff off their lap and still make the general public fear the besmerchment (is that even a real word?) of their good name and having it live forever and ever and ever.  I guess the next conclusion is that the person who filed the report simply got the name of one of Google’s co-founders mixed up with Soney Bonoi.  It’s a simple mistake, really.

So, does RipoffReport.com lie when they say they don’t delete reports? Technically, no.  Though, in my opinion they come off as bullies and assholes that hide behind the law to push some possibly honorable people around, technically they’re not liars. See for yourself.  The report hasn’t been deleted – only “fixed”.