William Stanley of ReputationMatrix.com Sentenced To 3 Years In Prison
Back in 2008-2012 there was one company online causing a major disruption in the Reputation Management industry; they went by the name Reputation Matrix and ran more of a Reputation Extortion mob than anything else.
Many Reputation Management Companies like ours were also victimized by this guy William Stanley and his nasty business practices. Reputation Matrix and it’s owner would create fake online complaints about many reputable reputation management firms in order to make his company seem more legit or level the playing field for his schemes. He would go online and file fake complaints about all sorts of competitors. There were over 100 complaints files against Reputation Defender during William Stanley’s rampage, he would then copy the complaints and replace the company name with another reputation management company, so essentially he filed the exact same claim against 8 or so different reputation companies. The boldest move that Stanley made is when one day he thought it would be a good idea to copy ReputationArmor.com’s entire website and use our name to conduct shady business, we quickly had the site taken down by Google using the DMCA removal process, the DMCA notice is still available to read online. This William guy would pose as our company and get payments online then rip people off… We had most of his web properties pretending to be us removed from the internet. We only operate under our main domain name ReputationArmor.com. Since he used our name in his nasty business we had to negotiate the removal of misdirected complaints about our brand. This is an example of how a good company that tries to really help clients can suffer because of a bad company using their name or brand online. We were victims of this guy and his scams. Protect your brand online and keep an eye on who is using the likeness of your name.
The boldest move this company made was when a company needing reputation help would contact them or reply to their offers for reputation management they would charge the companies $1500-$3000 for service then do nothing for them, if the company complained, Stanley would threaten to make matters worse for them online if they didn’t back off. If a company contacted them and did not sign-up, Reputation Matrix and Stanley would create nasty pages about them online and contact them and ask for money to remove it. He was causing the problem then offering the paid solution.
William Laurence Stanley a Former Texas Resident with ties to Romania, 53, owned a reputation management company that claimed to improve companies’ online reputations. Stanley was ordered to pay $174,888 in restitution to a dozen victims he extorted, including a Dallas-based firm, federal authorities said. He was also sentenced to 3 years and 1 month in prison for his shoddy business practice. Reports state that Stanley extorted at least 40 victims (that came fwd) and one company sent him over $29,000.00 after they called the FBI.