A range of activities. Claims to have shipped when he hasnt, blames covid for delays. Promises people tracking, gives them other peoples tracking numbers, if he responds at all. Claims to have stock on hand, doesnt. Marks product as genuine when they aint, just refunds the people who complain and keeps on keeping on. Charges for one tier of postage, uses another same deal.
His entire business operates off the premise that if he can make good on the 5% of people that complain, that it makes the fortune he makes from the rest that dont viable. Because most people it seems are just too lazy to care about a lot of these activities, even if they do get burned.
Because the business runs purely off google adds (and he has an exceptional return rate) it doesnt matter if any of the above customers come back, its already built into his margins.
A site goes down or gets impacted by a consumer affairs complaint or whatever, he just reboots with another domain in under half a day, starts all over again. He aint tied to his brands, customers, any of it. It's all in the magic of his maniuplation of the ad market.
"In a country with this many people and the modern ads market there is literally always another sucker around the corner."
He can be literally as shitty as he wants, and as long as he manages the fallout (which he has) he prints money. I found out through working with him that there are large numbers of these individuals all following the same model, and all respectively making more than they deserve.
It's literally one of the most depressing things i've ever encountered.
You might say "He couldnt do this forever but" yeah well, twelve years and counting and he lives in the multi million dollar house and I assure you, I do not.
it seemed to be part of some larger 'communication and marketing' package he was subscribed to. I was getting monthly email updates, etc - ghostwritten by someone else. It wasn't bad, but video responses to everything was annoying. It felt like he was intentionally trying to hide something.
Apparently they have IRC logs of him first talking about selling the information to spammers or using it to go phishing, which makes it a little worse.
I was a bit shocked when I got to the last line...
"Instead, he blogs about the most interesting ones. Companies embarrassed by having their e-mails posted online can get him to pull the entries from his blog for a small payment."
Not fair to say he ruined it. Even if he promoted people creating spam PRs.
He exposed the weak foundations for this campaign and hopefully now they will fix it.
DO said, it has been 7 years handling spams and they haven't fix the issue. Now it is so visible, that they can't ignore it anymore.
Spammer is a polite definition. His background is in marketing, the business he links brandscale[.]com is broken/abandoned. How long until we see these packages used as trojan horses? Or sold to third parties?
Wow, that Jake Ward guy linked in the middle is an absolute douchenozzle. His entire business model seems to be generating low-quality AI spam to help websites steal traffic from their competitors. The internet would be a better place if people like him didn't exist.
The spamming part really bugged me too. It seemed like he harvested these emails rather than any form of opt-in. This seems like bad science in general.
I love how many of comments on this article have no idea who Brad Feld is, and nobody bothered to read his bio before deciding he's a spammer. He's one of the more famous tech entrepreneurs and investors. He's had companies acquired, sits on the board of a bunch of big companies, and runs TechStars. Networking is his job, and he's been doing it for over 20 years. If he wanted to run a spam newsletter (which he has no reason to do), he has the resources to use something way better than Gmail. ;)
It looks like he used his access to millions of customer emails to spam them with his political views.
> I know you don’t want to hear this from me. And I guarantee I don’t want to say it.
This whole thing just reeks of narcissism and delusion. And that's saying something, since I mostly agree with him otherwise. I can't imagine this did anything but piss off a lot of people.
Never understood why the guardian gave him a platform.
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