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[Wyatt_Ehrenfels]

Author Wyatt Ehrenfels Addresses Gang Assault in Amazon.com

This message is unfortunately necessary to answer what is likely to be a flood of libelous and malicious rumors circulated in Usenet news groups.
Whenever members of a stalking gang based in the unmoderated Usenet
news group sci.psychology.psychotherapy decide to compose a message defaming the name "Wyatt Ehrenfels," the message, because of its cross-posting and because of its indexing by multiple news readers (web sites offering access to news groups), litters the pages of results on a Google or Yahoo search of the name "Wyatt Ehrenfels."

Having been issued the "tsunami warning," I have decided to answer this message before it runs ashore of the civilized world and contaminates an otherwise rational search landscape with Third World politics.

This is the passage:

" ... You and your friend Wy@tt Ehrenfls [NAME ALTERED] got kicked off Amazon discussions for posting fraudulent "reviews" and "discussions" of your own stuff, using aliases and sockpuppets and denying that it was even you. But Amazon caught you."

First of all, there is no "Amazon discussions." Amazon does not have a forum, and the author of this message is referring to Amazon.com's customer review of books. A heated discussion broke out in the review section for my book Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun after a member of the stalking gang submitted a false negative review of my book under the name of one of their other victims (i.e. Brad Jesness). The timing was no coincidence. The gang wished to punish me because I refused to remove from my web site a page I set aside for Mr. Jesness's ideas. The spurious customer review appeared just hours after I noticed that my page had vaulted over their network of anti-Jesness web pages in a Google search of the name "Brad Jesness." (Working feverishly, they had managed to regain the top spots after registering a domain bearing the name "Brad Jesness" (bradjesness.com), which they use to house yet another copy of the libelous and absurdly inaccurate Brad Jesness FAQ.

The stalking gang anticipated that both Mr. Jesness and I would request that Amazon officials remove the false negative review. So they used Amazon.com authentication feature so that the words "Real Name" would appear beneath the author (Brad Jesness). After complaining, Amazon officials initially balked, claiming that Mr. Jesness MUST have been the author, as the only way to authenticate a review is by validating his credit card number. Mr. Jesness at that point surmised that this was more than a mere case of impersonation, but a case of hacking and identity theft. I realized that these individuals either hacked into a database (for example the Credit Bureau [CBI] satellite) or applied for a credit card in the name Brad Jesness.

When it looked as if Amazon might not remove the false review, I decided I had to offset the blow to my statistics caused by the negative review. In addition to submitting a negative review, the stalking gang also submitted ratings of "no" (i.e. not helpful") to the two positive reviews that had already been in the review section. At the end of the day, there were 3 reviews overall, 1 negative review rating my book as a "1" which 8 of 8 gang members rated as "helpful" and two positive reviews rating my book as "5" which 2 of 10 rated as "helpful."

To offset these potentially damaging statistics, I turned to friends and supporters who I knew enjoyed the book and asked them to compose a few comments that I could post to Amazon.com. I decided to spare them the work of registering themselves and I also decided not to expose these individuals to the stalking gang, which have a long history of targets the family and supporters of their victims. So I registered a number of assumed names and submitted the reviews from my own desk. I even went so far as to submit a false positive review in the name of one of my stalkers, a graduate student earning a doctorate in Psychology from a university in Illinois. I figured this might dissuade her accomplices from additional mischief. It did not.

For a few days, the customer review area for my book looked like a war zone with duelling positive and negative reviews and other submissions that contained nothing but accusations, innuendoes, and character assassination.

Amazon.com officials did finally get around to removing the false negatives and with them, the false positives as well (which all shared the same source IP address), leaving only the two pre-existing reviews that the stalking gang continues to maintain have also been fabricated by the author.

But in the end, the truth of the matter is that I did not compose any positive reviews of my own work (except for the one-liner in the name of a female stalker).

After a review of my web site's access logs, it became clear that Amazon.com officials began accessing my report of the incident as well as a primary report on the gang's broader cyberstalking activities.

http://www.fireflySun.com/book/sci.psychology.psychotherapy.php
http://www.fireflysun.com/book/sci.psychology.psychotherapy_stalker_profiles.php
http://www.fireflySun.com/book/brad_jesness.php

Form letters were mindlessly emailed to each party. You know, that one that states that the activity of which the other party is accused will not be tolerated. The cyberstalking gang has actually been attempting to use this letter as support for their claim I forged positive reviews of my book.

Wyatt Ehrenfels