Three Companies Impersonated Millions to Influence Internet Policy

[Jupe]

> LCX and Lead ID were responsible for many of these fake comments, letters, and petition signatures. Across four advocacy campaigns in 2017 and 2018, LCX fabricated consumer responses used in approximately 900,000 public comments submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) at the U.S. Department of the Interior. Similarly, in advocacy campaigns between 2017 and 2019, Lead ID fabricated more than half a million consumer responses. These campaigns targeted a variety of government agencies and officials at the federal and state levels.

Wow. Just wow. How can anyone at these companies be avoiding jail time?

And who hired them? Is there no money trail?

[ummonk]

"An investigation by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) found that the fake comments used the identities of millions of consumers, including thousands of New Yorkers, without their knowledge or consent."

$615k seems like a slap on the wrist for what they did.

[dragonwriter]

> $615k seems like a slap on the wrist for what they did.

It is. But its also state and local officials using state law to try to get any punishment for what is a fairly serious federal crime that, for some reason, the federal government has elected not to prosecute. [0]

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001

[heavyset_go]

If an individual committed fraud by impersonating millions of people, they'd be in prison.

[hayst4ck]

In the game of prisoners dilemma, they defected and won. This means their strategy of corruption is a winning strategy. It means our law has failed and we can expect more people to practice a strategy of corruption and flouting the law rather than a strategy of adherence to the law or ethical principles.

[boomerango]

Puts on conspiracy hat

What if killing net neutrality was a given, but the administration wanted the appearance of due process…

God, I’ve grown jaded.

[wly_cdgr]

Slap on the wrist? Lol. $61.5m would be a slap on the wrist. $615k is a tip.

[mysterydip]

"but it says right here in article 5 paragraph 20 section b of the EULA you agreed to that we may use your personally identifiable information to improve our service."

[LoganDark]

> $615k seems like a slap on the wrist for what they did.

No fine has ever been a threat to any company. The entire system is such a joke.

[dclowd9901]

Right. They need to reopen commentary and unrepeal net neutrality. How is it that we have a system that rewards endless appeals in the judiciary but the equivalent of a mistrial in public policy is treated with a barely-there fine?

[latchkey]

I just watched the Nike/Air Jordan movie... kind of reminds me of the part where they just pay the $5k fine and have him wear the red shoes.

[cavisne]

Interestingly the actual judgement is significantly higher (still single digit millions). I dont really know what a "Statement of Financial Condition" is but I assume it means they are taking basically all the money these companies + their directors have.

These are not big operations, they were charging 7c a "lead", so each company made ~100k, and the CEO was running the script to send fake data himself.

[asdadsdad]

I kinda refuse to believe the US gov doesn't undertake astroturfing for its own needs

[jasonm23]

Their "suspected" employers just inhaled that amount of money before I finished this comment.

[hoppla]

Does this set precedence? Under $1 dollar fine for each identity impersonation is a bargain!

[levidos]

Less than $1 / fake comment.

[nurettin]

It is probably more than what they made as a "fake comment provider".

[hulitu]

> $615k seems like a slap on the wrist for what they did.

Justice was served.

[euroderf]

Viewed as an investment, it probably had a quite good ROI.

[rapsacnz]

$615k... feck. More like a gentle caress.

[thayne]

And a small slap at that.

[RajT88]

I remember debating with a guy I know about Net Neutrality leading up to this.

He was a sales director at a company that ran network backbone and fiber lines. He was insistent that the Net Neutrality debate was dumb, because it was trying to negate the peering agreements that make the industry run. The way he told it, anyone with a big backbone chooses to invest in peering arrangements with other companies who also make similar arrangements. If you are pushing an undue amount of traffic relative to the other party, you invest more. His take was that Netflix was supporting Net Neutrality so they wouldn't have to invest more in their peering arrangements.

Now - this is a guy who historically is almost always on the wrong side of history. I thought it an interesting talking point, but even now having had some exposure to the peering arrangements between (say) Microsoft and Akamai, I still don't know enough to be able to say whether this is even a valid talking point. I'm very sure this is just something he was told, and repeated ad nauseum.

This seems like the right audience (since I wasn't posting here back then), to ask if there's any legitimacy to this talking point?

[calibas]

Criminal organizations conspiring to subvert democratic processes... The companies should be dissolved, the people who organized it should go to jail, and the broadband companies should be fined millions.

[iandanforth]

The irony here is that none of that mattered for the purpose of this agreement. They committed fraud by saying they'd subvert the democratic process in one way, but did it in a lazy way instead.

[koboll]

They got fined $600k, the telecoms saved billions

Pretty good deal if you ask me

[1101010010]

This is only the tip of the iceberg. A majority of the "user content" (product reviews, brand engagement, comments on social media sites, etc) is completely fake, bought for and paid by big money interest aka bots. No different than automated scans of the IPv4 address space: simple, unsophisticated, low-cost and without any repercussion.

[glitcher]

More than anything this seems to highlight how naive this approach is for polling public opinion - using an easily gamed internet connected form. Really the whole thing was just a dog and pony show to begin with. The FCC leadership at the time showed absolutely zero intention of being persuaded by the public comments as their minds were already made up beforehand. It was just some kind of hand wavy bs attempt to pretend to perform their due diligence before doing what they were already going to do anyways.

[frob]

$615 million dollars seems like chump change for 9 million counts of identity fraud. I recently read a story where the local DA in Portland charged a homeless man for identity theft for stealing a wallet. He hadn't tried to represent himself as the other person; he literally just had the wallet and ID.

Yet again, turns out it's OK if you're a corporation.

[1-6]

Three companies wouldn't be doing such a crime if big money wasn't involved. An investigation to dig deeper must happen.

[p-e-w]

Not being very familiar with US government webdesign, it took a while for me to realize that this is in fact the official website of the NY attorney general, rather than the personal website of an individual.

The AG's name is written in huge letters on top, as if it was her, rather than her office, that mattered most. The name appears three times before the first paragraph of the article, and again in large, bold letters below the article. To an outside observer, this looks like a political personality cult, and the article itself reads like a PR fluff piece.

For comparison, this[1] is the official website of the German chancellor, the head of government, infinitely more important than an AG. His name is written as a regular-sized menu item, clearly subordinate to the office he occupies, and most of the articles use the term "The Federal Chancellor" to refer to him, rather than his name.

Taken as a whole, those websites paint a picture of radically contrasting administration styles, and aptly demonstrate just how incomprehensible US politics is for Europeans, and vice versa.

[1] https://www.bundeskanzler.de/bk-en

[sva_]

This kind of shit is one of the reasons why people stop believing in western democracy.

[robocat]

And yet democracy so tarnished still appears better to me than the alternatives we have tried so far.

I haven’t lived in some of the alternatives, but I have visited some, and I feel fortunate to have been born in New Zealand.

[ordu]

They are wrong here. A regime which is not western democracy probably would pretend that nothing happened. It is much more suspicious when there are not investigations like this. Sometimes it is worse: such kind of investigations are conducted by independent entities, which are then prosecuted and silenced.

I agree, that fine is a joke and cast doubt on western democracy, but what I want to say, is like Chircill's:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.[1]

In practice absolute level of your belief doesn't matter, only a relative one when comparing with alternatives.

[1] https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...

[green_man_lives]

Net Neutrality was one of the handful of things I wrote my representatives about. I knew it was going to be mostly fruitless, but goddamn this is disgusting.

[EMCymatics]

I'm not sure why my previous comment is flagged.

Clearly democracy is better than the alternatives.

[makeitdouble]

This is the actual "vote with your money" everyone's talking about.

[yosito]

Well, there's always that expat camp in Russia if you just can't take oppressive Western democracy anymore.

[zzzeek]

$615K for three companies, this is not even a parking ticket. This just puts a pretty discount price to pay for companies that want to impersonate their customers for fraudulent purposes.

[olliej]

3 companies defrauded the government and pretended to be millions of US citizens in order to make billions in illegitimate profits.

Were fined a few hundred thousand.

Why isn’t every individual involved in jail? Why haven’t all the company assets been seized?

Also, given that they were impersonating real living people, can we please get a list of those people? Or at least have the victims of identity theft, fraud, and I think for many on HN defamation?

The _only_ reason those details should not be available is to further protect these shit stains.

[exabrial]

My problem with Net Neutrality is what is its the "wrong way" to deal with a pesky problem: entrenched local monopolies.

Net Neutrality is "oking" monopolistic behavior, under a narrow set of stipulations. I don't trust Comcast any farther than I could throw their CEO.

I just don't see this ending well. I think the alternatives: expanding access, increasing competition, improving technology and promoting innovation, busting oligopolies at the state and municipal level is the way to go.

This is my opinion, so feel free to disagree. There are definite upsides to net neutrality right now for "here and now" problems, but it's not a good long term solution IMHO.

[dclowd9901]

Infrastructure building is NOT an activity that benefits from free and open markets. The only way this works is if things change such that only government can build out infra, but it can be serviced by the best provider.

[lost_tourist]

It's a step in the right direction. Enabling localities to set up their own competing internet services would be the logical follow up to that.

[croes]

Without net neutrality you are oking monopolistic behavior on the internet service level.

[habitue]

It says "the nation's largest broadband companies" but doesn't say which ones. Does anyone have more context here?

[RecycledEle]

New York Attorney General James Secures $615,000 from Companies that Supplied Fake Comments to Influence FCC’s Repeal of Net Neutrality Rules

[ridgeguy]

Toothless and useless without criminal prosecution and jail time.

[surume]

Lol, $600k is quite simply a joke. It's not even a slap on the wrist, compared to the payoff. And spread between three companies? If that's the price of corrupting government policy, then just build it into the cost that you pass onto your clients when lobbying. Mega-corps like Comcast and Verizon would pay that in a microsecond.

[janosdebugs]

I have to wonder how on Earth this is not a criminal matter. Where I live, signing a document with someone else's name is, AFAIK, something you could potentially go to jail for.

[AHOHA]

Yesterday I saw a graph of how money these operators make each second, revenue is in billions, a ~600k is like a business trip cost for one of the executives.