StopECG

Ah, hello there, I guessed you’d be back… I refer to those of you who instigated the criminal Denial Of Service attack on www.stopECG.org. Why did I report it as Denial (Part 1)? Did I know your next planned move?! Or did I do it just to get you back here?

Actually a different sort of denial I want to talk about today, it is a personal message to some people who have spent a lot of time posting some very unpleasant things about me on a web forum owned by Eye-Net (directors Thomas Volkmer and Udo Prummer). Of course I cannot discount the possibility that some of the people who post to that ‘forum’ are the same people who attacked stopecg.org and me personally through my online business.

It is the forum I wish to discuss today, it’s quite a rarified atmosphere in there isn’t it? I mean if anyone posts in my favour or (god forbid) puts Mr Ludenbach’s name on there the omnipotent ‘Admin’ will remove it. So who is Admin? Is it you, Udo? Or you, Thomas? Perhaps whoever removes the posts would like to give us their real name because it is you I am talking to today, about denial.

Denial on a personal level is a sickness, it allows you to go on the wrong course in life because deep down you shut out the truth, your own brain deceives you into thinking your course of action is OK and those who try to warn you are often shunned or even vilified. Being In Denial is a potent state of mind, and one that can often lead to disaster.

Now there seem to be some people out there who are in denial right now, unwilling to accept that the way they do business is morally reprehensible, that it causes others a great deal of suffering. Men who go home to their comfortable houses and lavish money on pleasure while others, far away lose sleep and fret, because they signed a piece of paper in error and the callous people who sent it to them are now hounding them for money.

To send the document in ignorance of its misleading nature and then to refuse the pleas of those who signed by mistake would be revolting enough, but to continue to send the forms once you KNOW that people will become entrapped, that is plain evil. And we have not even got round to discussing the means used to threaten and intimidate these poor people into paying against their will.

Of course when you behave like this and live in denial of the suffering caused you need to sure up your beliefs, so what better than a ‘forum’ where only you and your friends can post, where you can poke fun at those who make a moral stand against you and can pretend that you are the upstanding citizens?

I feel sure denial is a topic that will come up again, so please check back for part 3

Jules Woodell

It's as if someone were employed pretty much full time attack the anti-scam sites, every week we see new methods employed, be it legal, dubious or outright criminal. It appears that some scammers will try any tactic that might deflect people away from the sites that expose them. This is understandable, if a person being hounded by a scam artist feels alone they are more vulnerable, the internet allows scam victims to get together and fight back, it can be the worst enemy of the conman.

The latest attack on stopECG.org is one of the more bizarre

Over recent weeks a number of ‘mirror’ sites have appeared

http://www.ecggonow.com/
http://www.runecg.org/
http://www.joinecg.com/
http://www.orderecg.com/
http://www.gogoecg.com/
http://www.goecg.org/
http://www.rideecg.com/
http://www.stecgop.com/
http://www.gogoecg.com/
http://www.goecgnow.com/
http://www.stecgop.com/
http://www.no-more-music.com/

However these sites do not contain the exact text of stopECG.org.

* The content has been deliberately jumbled to become meaningless.
* External links have been replaced with links to travel and kids sites.
* The images have been put through some software that smudges them like a gouache paining to make the newspaper articles unreadable.
* Important text such as the addresses to complain to appears to have been completely removed.

The only text that remains uncorrupted is in the Meta tags (which tell search engines what the site is about).

The objective appears to be to put meaningless results into the search engines so that people, particularity those who do not speak English and who need to use translation tools are unable to find the advice offered on stopECG.org.

How can you help?
Actually it is really simple to assist, please post links to www.stopECG.org on your website or blog, and/or reproduce the advice from stopECG, if you do not have a site consider setting up an account with a free webspace provider such as Geocities. Incoming links will elevate stopECG.org in search engine results above the sites full of corrupted content, making it easier to find, so we really need as many links as possible in order to drown the junk results out. This means that by the simple act of posting links to us you will help others out there who are seeking advice about the scams!

A little tutorial Keywords and Anchor words

Anchor words are the words that make up the blue part of an incoming link e.g. a link that says Stop The Tour And Travel Guide and links to http://www.stopecg.org/tandt.htm#tt is good, if it just says more info Here it is not quite as effective

Key words are the words you use in the piece you write, basically what we need here is for you to name the guide you are in dispute with and then to include words that you think others looking for advice on that guide might use like complaint, contract, misleading etc. There are plenty more words, so use your imagination! The ideal piece would name all the guides with each guide name being a link to the relevant page on stopECG.org. That said it will help all involved it you host some of the basic advice for scam victims, such as the addresses of government agencies accepting complaints.

Translations
If you can translate any part of the advice on stopECG into your own language and post it on the www you will be helping those in your own country! Short of time? Post a small piece in your own language with lots of keywords and ask other guide victims who find it to get in contact and assist with building the site.

Jules Woodell

Last week saw 2 criminal attacks, the first against me personally, the second targeted at www.stopecg.org

In the first attack emails were faked to appear to have come from my online music business, the headers of the emails were also constructed so that bounced messages and replies would come to me. The Emails were set up to look like crude spam and even included a short list of records for sale. 'Hold on', I hear you ask, 'wouldn't this benefit the record shop?'

No, the intention was clearly to harm, the emails were sent exclusively to law firms, both unlikely clients for my product and a group more likely to take strong action when spammed. My suspicions were always that this was the action of one of the parties exposed on stopecg.org, a suspicion greatly reinforced when I discovered that a near identical attack was carried out against a businessman in Germany. Surprise! The German has also managed a website that exposes directory scams.

The second attack was an attempt to shut down www.stopecg.org, It was what is known as a Denial Of Service (DOS) attack,

This attack appears to have made use of 3rd party computers so called 'zombie' machines that had been hijacked by the attacker and instructed to bombard stopecg.org making it inaccessible to ordinary users. The effect was to force a temporary outage.

Both these attacks involved breaches of numerous laws, they were criminal activity, of course at this stage we cannot say for sure who perpetrated these crimes, investigations are underway.

I feel sure that some people reading this weblog will know exactly who is behind the attacks, perhaps you do not approve of their methods and would like to see them punished for their crimes, there are ways you can do this.

1. Simply report them to your local police, this can usually be done anonymously, or you could just put a dossier of evidence in the post and reference this page so the police know what they are investigating.
   
2. Pass information to me, any information you have may help, but please remember that the more hard and verifiable facts you provide the more likely it is that a prosecution will follow. Emails will be treated in the strictest confidence. If you would prefer not to send an email you can post anonymously to a forum of your choice, anywhere on the www, as long as you include the word denialecg in your post (this word is currently not used anywhere on the internet so if you post it we will find your post as soon as it is referenced by Google). Please consider using an anonymous forum where we can reply and have a dialogue.
   

IMPORTANT: Please include all the information you have, little details such as networks used, the exact timing of the attacks and the wording used in the fake emails will help us to verify your report and may also give us leads.

Jules Woodell - 15th May 2006

I guess it was inevitable that with the naming of Ludenbach as the man behind so many scams there would be a temptation amongst those who gain from, or support his activities to take a more personal line in their attacks on me.

So it was that from October 2005 posts have appeared on an obscure German forum portraying me as blacker than coal and portraying those who perpetrate the scams as victims of my malice. Anonymous posters using names such as 'berkan' and 'Landor' posted a mixture of half truths, lies and insinuations. The posts were then translated into several languages.

Apparently I run the 'nastiest smear campaign against an entire business branch' and am on the watch list of the FBI. Landor's post dated 03.02.2006 had me in physical pain (through laughter) with its closing line 'Mr. Woodell must be stopped. He is a danger to our society and not the New Age Robin Hood he claims to be.'

For a while some of the victims of the scams replied, however the administrator soon intervened, deleting all the responses hostile to the guides and following up with another comical comment.

For legal reasons and for the protection of the general public, we are not able to publish any articles/contributions of Jules Woodell's friends who in any way support or approve of the anarchistic activities of Jules Woodell.

An interesting take on the cross section of the UK business community who had posted!

It was becoming clear, this was not a forum for open discussion, rather it appears to be a vehicle for the defamation of those who oppose the Lüdenbach business model.

Since then the posts have continued as a one sided tirade, in a new tactic, a string of posts purporting to come from the directors of Ludenbach related companies. Michael Röwe Managing Director of NovaChannel AG, Alexander Zweigart of Premium Recovery AG and Francisco Lopez-Pelaez, Managing Director of The European City Guide have all posted. Each shows a surprising similarity in writing style and a remarkable ability to post in several languages. The comments range from mindless diatribe through stupid questions (Am I on the FBI watch list?) to outright threats ('your financial existence will be destroyed').

Perhaps it is time to take s quick look at who actually runs such a one-sided forum?

Under German Law WebPages must have an Impression page where ownership details are displayed, this forum, we are told belongs to eye-net GmbH: Directors: Thomas Volkmer and Udo Prummer.

Interesting... Volkmer and Prummer used to work for Novachannel AG, an association they were so embarrassed about that they brought a law suit against the German individual who exposed the link. Through a domain it registered, vcsystem.com Eye-net has also hosted link farm pages for Ovag and Novachannel in the past as well as some porn sites. Indeed Thomas Volkmer appeared alongside a certain Mario Singer in the Whois records for one of the Ovag sites.

Could it be that Volkmer and Prummer are not as far removed from the scams as they would like people to believe? Do they still work for Meinolf Lüdenbach? We may never know.

Whatever their motive for running this forum it is really rather infantile, do these people really have nothing better to do than scour the Net to find out what Schools I went to?