OAKLAND, Calif. – Reflex Media, the company which operates the “sugar dating” site SeekingArrangement.com, has filed a lawsuit against a Bangladeshi man and 50 John Doe defendants, alleging computer fraud and abuse, unauthorized access to computers, intentional interference with prospective economic advantage, unfair competition, and civil conspiracy.
The lawsuit arises from an extortion scheme allegedly perpetrated by the defendants against members of SeekingArrangement.com.
According to the complaint, which was filed last Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, some of the defendants “join SeekingArrangement.com and pose as legitimate members for the purpose of gathering personal identifying information, including members’ photos, email addresses, phone numbers, and locations.”
“For example, a Defendant may join SeekingArrangement.com and pose as an attractive woman seeking to date successful men,” the complaint continues. “Defendants then entice the male user to provide certain personal identifying information.”
Once the personal identifying information has been obtained, the plaintiffs allege the information is then uploaded to various “extortion websites” whereon the SeeingArrangement.com members (“SA Members”) are “accused of offering sex for money and associated with child predation.”
“The SA Members are then referred to the Removal Sites where they are told that the posting can be removed for a fee, which generally ranges from a few hundred to even thousands of dollars,” according to Reflex.
To exert added pressure on the targets of the scheme, “many SA Members also receive text messages advising them that their information has been posted on the Extortion Websites and sometimes receive threats that the posting will be more widely disseminated (e.g. on mainstream social media) if they do not pay the Removal Sites to remove the posting,” according to the plaintiffs.
The content of the text messages allegedly sent to targets of the scheme includes statements like “You and I were posted. Your number and pics are on the site predatoralerts.com for offering to pay for sex. I used internetreputation.com to delete it quickly” and “You and I were posted on www.predatoralerts.com/[phone number of SA Member] for offering money to girls online for sex I used netreputation.com to get it deleted. They are good.”
According to the complaint, other messages to SA members “have included threats to make referrals to law enforcement and/or the SA Members’ employers.”
Reflex says it has caught some of the defendants in the act, shut down their accounts and banned them from further use of the site – but that “thereafter Defendants personally, or through their agents, returned to SeekingArrangement.com where they created new Decoy Profiles and continued to mine SA Members’ personal identifying information.”
“In other words, these Defendants accessed, and without permission, (i) used Reflex Media’s data in order to perpetrate a scheme to defraud SeekingArrangement.com’s customers; (ii) took and made use of data from Reflex Media’s computers, computer system and/or computer network, (iii) used Reflex Media’s computer services, and (iv) accessed Reflex Media’s computers, computer system and/or computer network,” Reflex claims in its complaint.
In addition to financial damages to be proved at trial, Reflex is also asking the court for injunctive relief which would permanently bar the defendants from “extorting Reflex Media’s customers; using any image, word, phone number of other identifying information collected from Reflex Media’s websites for any purpose; accessing any of Reflex Media’s websites; otherwise competing unfairly with Reflex Media in any manner; and continuing to perform in any manner whatsoever any of the other acts complained of in this complaint.”
As described in Reflex’s complaint, the alleged scheme greatly resembles an approach employed by some revenge porn sites – and which ultimately led to the conviction of Kevin Bollaert, the operator of the now-defunct sites UGotPosted.com and ChangeMyReputation.com.
On Friday, a summons was issued by the court to Arman Ali, the only defendant whose name was known at the time of filing, requiring him to serve the plaintiff with (and file with the court) an answer to the complaint within 21 days.
