PHOENIX – For years, Ripoff Report, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona has been accused of ripping off small businesses by allowing false material to be published by clients in the name of free speech. Victims could pay the company to consider making the defamatory information go away – a practice many believed was a form of extortion.
This week, the Report’s extortionist, Joshua Polloso Epifaniou, was sentenced in the Northern District of Georgia to 12 months and one day in prison.
Ripoff Report allows users over the age of 14 to complain anonymously about any firm or person. The site requires creating an account before “reports” can be submitted but it does not verify the identity of users. Ripoff Report results may show up on Google searches for the people (or firms) mentioned in the report, which can be potentially embarrassing or damaging for them. Reports are not automatically added to the website: they must be approved first.
According to the site’s Terms of Service, users are required to affirm that their reports are truthful and accurate, but the site says that it neither investigates, confirms nor corroborates the accuracy of submissions.
Companies or individuals who have been named in a report may respond with a rebuttal at the bottom of the same webpage, which explains their side of the story, if the rebuttal is approved by Ripoff Report. There is no charge to submit a rebuttal, but they must have a registered account. Alternatively, to “repair the reputation” because of something that is written in the website, Ripoff Report asks them to pay for investigations of complaints and responses carried out by “Ripoff Report’s pool of Arbitrators”, and to edit the webpage. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, this mechanism is an example of “how to make money rebuilding reputations: have them destroyed first”, which is why a federal court stated that victims have “probable cause to sue for extortion and racketeering“.
The year-long sentence comes on top of the nearly four years Epifaniou, of Cyprus, has already served in custody since his arrest in Cyprus in May 2017. Epifaniou pleaded guilty to federal computer fraud charges brought in Arizona and the Northern District of Georgia. As a result of his conviction, Epifaniou forfeited $389,113 and 70,000 euros to the government and paid $600,000 in restitution to the victims of his fraud. Epifaniou is the first Cypriot national ever extradited from Cyprus to the United States.
Between October 2014 and May 2017, Epifaniou hacked websites and monitored online traffic to identify targets for extortion. After selecting target websites, Epifaniou worked with co-conspirators to steal personally identifiable information from the websites’ databases. Epifaniou then used proxy servers located in foreign countries to log into email accounts and send messages to the websites threatening to leak the sensitive data unless a ransom was paid in cryptocurrency.
Other victims of Epifaniou’s computer terrorism included an online sports news website owned by Turner Broadcasting System Inc. in Atlanta, Georgia, a free online game publisher based in Irvine, California, a hardware company based in New York, New York, and an online employment website headquartered in Innsbrook, Virginia.
After extorting Ripoff Report, Epifaniou also hacked into its website to remove online complaints at the request of paying clients. Epifaniou and his co-conspirator, Pierre Zarokian, charged clients between $1,000 and $5,000 for each complaint removal and falsely told clients that the removals were court-ordered.