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Saturday Morning Fraud News

Tracy Coenen has a nice round-up of all the bloggers who are rallying to the support those posting critical remarks about Shop to Earn.

"It all started a few weeks ago when blogger Everyday Finance wrote a post about the ShopToEarn and ShopToEarth program. He highlighted both positives and negatives that he found with their MLM program. It wasn't long before he got a cease and desist email from Gerry Nehra (former attorney for mlm giant Amway), threatening legal action if he didn't take down his negative comments about the company.

I then wrote my own critique of the mlm program, and got my own cease and desist email. The original blogger modified the posts on his blog that made Shop To Earn so mad, but that wasn't good enough. Gerald Nehra then demanded he take down his site within 24 hours.

And the blogosphere is rallying to stop this kind of bullying. Bloggers are entitled to express their opinions, whether or not MLMs like ShopToEarn want them to or not."

Roger Parloff, writing at his blog at Fortune, notes the difficulty that eBay is having with complying with the terms of the injunction.

"On the French eBay site, ebay.fr, the same searches (using both 'perfume' and 'parfum') produces 0 results for each of the brands - so some blocking must be happening. However, at the bottom of those same search results pages, there's a box with links to eBay boutiques outside France (US, UK and Canada, mainly, but I also saw Spain) that offer perfumes by the three [sic] producers for auction."

In response to Peter's observations, an eBay spokeswoman says: "At this stage our comment still remains the same as earlier, which is we are actively working towards finding an effective solution."

I would have thought that the Court would have suspended its order for 30 days to allow eBay to come up with an effective solution. You should read all of Roger's article because he sets out all the different lawsuits involved.

Finally, some sense on the economic front from the Onion who reports:

"A panel of top business leaders testified before Congress about the worsening recession Monday, demanding the government provide Americans with a new irresponsible and largely illusory economic bubble in which to invest.

"What America needs right now is not more talk and long-term strategy, but a concrete way to create more imaginary wealth in the very immediate future," said Thomas Jenkins, CFO of the Boston-area Jenkins Financial Group, a bubble-based investment firm. "We are in a crisis, and that crisis demands an unviable short-term solution."

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• Multi-Level Marketing Company Threatens Blogger Who Writes Critical Post
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• eBay: we protect the seller, buyers can go to hell
• eBay Has To Pay $63m Because A French Court Doesn't Know A Platform From A User

Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on July 19, 2008 (boomark / email).