Ben Stein's Employer Drops Lawsuit Against Blogger

In a previous post I described how Freescore.com, Ben Stein's employer, had sought to silence a blogger who was dared to criticize that slimy company. Public Citizen's Consumer Law and Policy Blog reports that the suit has been dropped.

But here's what makes the whole thing funny. Freescore claimed "victory" because it said its suit against Yahoo!--another Stein employer-- was moot because it had identified the blogger who had the temerity to criticize these night crawlers.

According to CL&P:

...the villain whom they want to sue for defamation is Franklin Seegers, who allegedly lives in Washington, DC.

A few minutes research online would have told them how wrong that is. According to the Washington Post, in 2006 DC resident Franklin Seegers was sentenced to 40 years for his role in a violent drug gang known as Murder Inc. Federal Bureau of Prisons records show that Seegers can now be found at the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina. These are the brilliant sleuths who charge $29.95 per month for protection against identity theft for Internet users who call to get their “free” credit score?

More on this from Ben Stein's nemesis, Felix Salmon, in his blog here.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Ben Stein's Employer Trying to Silence Blogger

Yahoo columnist Stein shills for creeps trying to ruin a blogger's life

Seems that Freescore, the sleazy outfit for which Ben Stein is shilling, is on the warpath against a blogger who criticized these creeps. Public Citizen has intervened on the blogger's behalf.

The irony is that the litigation involves Yahoo, which employs Stein as a columnist. Sound familiar?

The citizen watchdog group says:

Adaptive Marketing, a company that has drawn a bevy of consumer complaints and negative media coverage for its FreeScore.com services, should not be able use the courts to unmask an anonymous blogger in retaliation for articles that questioned the companys bait-and-switch business tactics, Public Citizen said today in a motion filed in superior court in Stamford, Conn.

The company, which uses TV personality and commentator Ben Stein to hawk its offer of free credit scores to consumers, has filed a motion with the court asking that Yahoo! be ordered to identify the blogger behind the flaneur de fraude blog. Yahoo! was the target of the discovery because flaneur has a Yahoo! email address. The blogger, along with media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, wrote about how Adaptive and its parent company Vertrue, Inc., mislead consumers through schemes such as offering free credit scores and then adding recurring charges to their monthly credit card bills for other services.

Oh, I'd be remiss in not pointing out the URL of the blog Stein's employers are trying to silence: http://datatoinformation.wordpress.com/.

I repeat: http://datatoinformation.wordpress.com/ Be sure to bookmark that.

Take a bow, Ben Stein! You really have sold your soul on this one. But I must admit, you certainly are getting some terrific publicity for Freescore, as well as yourself, and from more than just your old pal Felix Salmon. Let's hope regulators shut it down, and fast, thanks to your good work.

The target of this litigation is Yahoo, because the blogger has a Yahoo email address.

Stein does a column for Yahoo, one entitled, ironically enough, "How to Not Ruin Your Life."

Yessireebob, this fellow is a walking conflict of interest.

I can't for the life of me understand how Yahoo can use Stein to offer personal finance advice under these circumstances. Hell, it's wrangling in court with his employers--guys who are trying to ruin a blogger's life. Seems pretty open-and-shut to me.

UPDATE: Adaptive Marketing is apparently going berserk, suing everybody in sight. Meanwhile it has a Senate subpoena heading its way. Oh goodie.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Ben Stein's 'Unblemished' Employer

The Times calls this a conflict of interest for a finance columnist. The nerve!

(updated with class action suit)

I have no idea if Ben Stein is correct when he claims that the New York Times wasn't really upset with his acting as principal spokesman for something called FreeScore.com. He says a column on Obama is what really teed 'em off.

That's possible. Maybe they decided they didn't like his haircut either. I can't read the minds of any of the persons concerned. But I do know that Stein's description of FreeScore--he calls it "an Internet aggregating company" with an "unblemished record with consumer protection agencies"--is.... well, let's just say "incomplete."

FreeScore has got the word "free" in its name, and its website emphasizes that word. Free! Free! That word must be used a dozen times. Nowhere on the first page of its website do you see that you have got to pay $29.95 a month for the privilege of getting your credit scores.

Mouseprint.org has a great analysis of how FreeScore snares unwary consumers in its website and TV commercials.

It seems quite obvious that the newspaper puked its corporate guts when it saw that its high visibility columnist was shilling for a sleazy outfit like this. If this isn't a conflict of interest, I don't know what is.

While Stein may be right that this company has a spotless record with regulatory agencies, that only indicates to me that regulatory agencies, particularly the Federal Trade Commission, have got some work to do. As Mouseprint points out, FreeScore only recently commenced its advertising campaign. That probably helps explain its "unblemished" record.

FreeScore.com is just one of numerous businesses run by an outfit called Vertrue, Inc., which according to its website is " owned by Velo Holdings, a private investor group consisting of One Equity Partners, Rho Ventures and Brencourt Advisors, together with certain members of Vertrue's management."

A list of Vertrue's businesses can be found at its listing at the Better Business Bureau website, where it receives a BBB rarity--an "F" grade for customer service.

Anyone who has ever dealt with the BBB can attest that it is anything but a rabid pro-consumer organization. Its main job is to protect its membership by giving consumers an ineffective venue for complaints. "F" grades are only given to the absolute dregs.

Vertrue's questionable business practices have been plastered over the media, and resulted in this letter (pdf) to Vertrue's CEO by the Senate Commerce committee. And then we have a class action suit against Vertrue and Adaptive Marketing LLC, the unit that owns FreeScore.com, which makes some serious allegations:

The Complaint alleges that Defendants’ business models are based on gaining access to confidential credit card and bank account information in order to charge consumers fees for worthless “memberships” and “services” that plaintiffs and other Class members never desired or authorized. By doing so, the Complaint states, Defendants have established one of the largest unauthorized consumer billing operations in the United States through the placement of internet advertising on various legitimate (and illegitimate) websites. As the Complaint alleges, VistaPrint’s advertisements purport to sell graphic design and customized printed products, while Vertrue and Adaptive Marketing purport to sell membership programs that provide discounts on various consumer goods and services. And, as the Complaint states, because there is no legitimate demand for Adaptive Marketing’s membership programs, VistaPrint’s internet websites and advertisements serve as a pretext for gaining access to consumers’ confidential financial information in order to charge unauthorized fees.

In fact, the Complaint further alleges, consumers almost never legitimately join any of Vertrue and Adaptive Marketing’s various membership programs, nor do they authorize Defendants Vertrue and Adaptive Marketing to charge their credit cards or debit from their bank accounts any monies. The Complaint asserts that when consumers contact any of the Defendants to request that they remove and refund the unauthorized fees charged to their credit cards, they are given the “runaround”, and are unable to obtain refunds of the unauthorized charges.

Here's the Epinions writeup on another Adaptive Marketing venture: "Here is a company that sells your credit card or bank information, without you knowing, to anyone willing to pay for it. " Real sweethearts.

I assume that Stein has Internet access, which was all he would have needed to obtain these little nuggets of information about the people who have hired him. He knew, or should have known, the track record of this company, and that being the public face of an Adaptive Marketing LLC unit carried with it definite risks.

Stein says the following at the end of his American Spectator piece:

In my life, I have done plenty wrong. I am not the master. I am the servant and a poor one at that.

Yeah, I know. He is in hot water because he is servant of an outfit that takes advantage of poor, befuddled, desperate consumers. But if he's "poor" after letting his punum be plastered over its website, he should get himself another agent.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Ben Stein on the Meshuganeh Market

What a punum!

I just got around to reading Ben Stein's provocative column in the New York Times yesterday, which suggests that the stock market is overreacting to the subprime mess, and doing so because traders are manipulating the market.

Stein has been pilloried for this column in unusually strong language. Too strong, really.

I say that because, if he's right, it would be good news. It would mean that the market is being temporarily manipulated and thus, if markets are reasonably efficient, will swiftly rebound and stay rebounded.

As one whose bucks are tied up in index funds and such, I'd like to believe that. It's a harmless hypothesis, so what's all the fuss?

Some years ago there used to be a theory that traders for the big houses used to game the market by something called "index frontrunning." That is, they would cause the indexes to move, and profits from prepositioned trades designed to take advantage of such a move.

I wrote about it for Business Week and..... nothing happened. Apparently it wasn't happening, or if it was happening it wasn't caught. It was still being "studied" as of 1991, and since then it has been conveniently forgotten.

So Stein is making a less-than-credible if conceivable assertion. We all do that from time to time. Let the man be.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

The Hedge Fund Class

Ben Stein's column in the New York Times today should be required reading for every legislator on Capitol Hill. And I mean that literally. They should be tied to their desks and forced to read it.

Stein gives a brilliant dissection of a phenomenon that can only be described as evil: the rise of a class of super-rich hedge fund and private equity managers who are, almost invariably, taxed at a rate far below the rest of us.

Is it right or even admissible in the human conscience that while teachers, emergency room technicians, police and firefighters are taxed at full earned-income rates — and often underpaid — that the highest-earning people in this country should pay at either very low tax rates or none at all?

Or, put it like this: do we dare send our men and women to fight for an America in which the very rich are so favored by the government that it amounts almost to an aristocracy?

"Congress," Stein says, "can take notice of a mammoth inequity in taxation during wartime and make the tax on private equity and hedge funds approximate the treatment of other highly paid people — or it can continue down the road to the Bastille."

This essay will, of course, be greeted by the usual cries of horror from the hedge fund industry. Tough. Time to make the tax code more fair to the rest of America and end this super-class of the super-rich.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.



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