It was the summer of 2012. I had been out of grad school and working as a security engineer for the red team of a major corporation for just over a year, but one thing really bugged me: my debt. After six years of college, I had a lot of it, and I had a car payment on top of that. So, to pay it off as quickly as I could and to figure out just how little I really needed in life, I decided to do something a little insane: I got a storage unit, moved out of my apartment, and into my car.

The experience taught me a lot. There were numerous problems to solve like how to safely wire electricity into my car, where to park without being bothered or getting in trouble, how to turn my seats into a decently comfortable bed, etc, but as an Eagle Scout, it was a lot like camping. With most of my belongings crammed into a 5′ x 10′ storage unit, I realized that I really didn’t need a whole lot to get by in life. In just over a year, I managed to pay off all my debt, and I even started a blog about my experience, https://HomelessProfessional.com. After almost three years of being technically homeless, I had saved up about $30k.

When the senior director of my department nearly died from an intestinal rupture, he went on leave for nearly five months. The day before his return, his assistant emailed out to let everyone know but didn’t mention anything about a, “Welcome back – glad you’re not dead,” party. So, I shot back a message asking if anything had been planned. She told me that unfortunately, no one had been able to do anything, and both she and the VP’s assistant would be out of town. As such, she told me that I could always plan something. However, as a Dilbert, I’m not exactly the party-planning type.

I pondered what on earth I could do. What do you get for someone who is sick? Flowers, right? Yeah, this guy regularly spent time working on his Dodge Challenger and isn’t exactly the flower type. Since I lived in my car, I was regularly in the office until late, and as I leaned back in my chair, I noticed a bag of beef jerky. Beef jerky flowers. I could totally make beef jerky flowers. After numerous trips to grocery stores and gas stations and over three hours of work, the first Broquet was born.

My coworkers and senior director thought it was the coolest thing ever, and more than one person suggested that I sell them on the side for extra money. Considering the first one took me so long to make, I wasn’t exactly interested. However, since I have a degree in engineering, I started pondering how I could speed up the process. In my spare time, I started doing research and handcrafting equipment, and I slowly inched forward.

After another year or so, a good friend of mine told me that I needed to either, um . . . “poop” or get off the pot. He was right. I’d spent enough time talking about this “Say It With Beef” idea but hadn’t really gone all-in. I knew that as someone in his late 20s, if I wanted to start a business, it was now or never. With the money I’d saved up from living in my car, I decided to get started, dropped $8k to have brand package and website built, left my job, and moved forward.

Odds are, you know the rest – I launched in September 2016 as a one-man show and went viral in January 2017. However, I wanted to tell you some of the rest of the back story because I believe it’s important to explain what it took for me to make Say It With Beef a reality. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t born overnight. It took over a year of planning, literally hundreds of hours making equipment by hand, and lots of money. I’m not rolling in it, now, either – small businesses don’t make a profit for the first few years, and the same is true for me. I’ve spent every penny I have as well as a sizable portion of my parent’s retirement. What happened next threatens all of that.

On January 20th, I had to stop taking sales of Broquets after receiving 700 orders in just four days. I scrambled to find employees and figure out how to get enough raw material. In the midst of this, on February 5th, the domain name ManlyManCo.com was registered, and on February 9th, the site went live. So did ads above Google search results encouraging people to “Say It With Beef for Valentine’s Day.”

At first, I wasn’t too concerned with Manly Man. My product uses vastly-superior jerky since I insisted on using whole muscle jerky for the “stems” instead of that recycled shoe-sole snack-stick “jerky” like they do. Also, I was fairly confident that my following was substantial enough that I could continue to expand my brand recognition and customer base. I contacted a lawyer to send a few cease and desist letters to put a stop to the trademark-infringing ads.

After researching the owner of Manly Man, I learned that this wasn’t the first time that he had ripped off another company for a quick buck before his efforts went south. As the son of owners of resort properties in southern California, he was just some guy with mommy and daddy’s money to play with. Say It With Beef meant something to me, and unlike him, I was willing to put forth the time, money, effort, and sacrifice to make my business a success. I believed I could outlast him by just doing it better and working harder.

After the founder’s wife ordered one of my rose Broquets using her maiden name so that Manly Man could reverse-engineer them (I have the purchase record and everything), I occasionally kept tabs on their site and Facebook page to make sure he wasn’t ripping off more of my products. In August of 2017 (shortly after he responded to one of my cease and desist letters), I noticed something was certainly up. Until then, his following was a fairly-consistent 300 or so. However, it had suddenly jumped up to over 2,000 – well over my page at that point in time.

I started monitoring his growth and taking snapshots. In under two weeks, he gained 8,000 likes, and when I put the growth on a chart, it was almost perfectly linear as you can see in the second picture:

Obviously, he was using some sort of “like bot” to pump up the appearance of his company. In his July 20th letter to my attorney in response to our cease and desist letter (literally a week before this activity started), he had stated, “[A]s a matter of planned marketing changes completely unrelated to your letter, the phrase ‘say it with beef’ is no longer a part of our marketing copy, and that should alleviate SlWB’s expressed concern.” Translation: “You pissed me off by calling me out. I wasn’t going to take my knock-off company seriously, but now, I’m going to do everything I can to destroy your silly little business out of spite.” Awesome – how honorable of him.

I reached out to Facebook with a complaint, but they have no real way to submit this sort of specific issue, so I filed it under the closest-matching category I could find at the time: copyright violation. The response was less than satisfactory, and I was simply told that Manly Man’s page didn’t violate any copyrights. I explained why I had submitted my complaint via that channel and asked them to look into Manly Man’s suspicious activity, but I was again told to pound sand. I wasn’t too worried, though. Based on everything I had read, boosting your page with a fake following doesn’t jive well with Facebook’s algorithms, causes issues with your advertising, and is essentially the social media equivalent of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

It was another year before Manly Man became a problem again, but this time, it was for real. I had noticed that his website had a reviews section, but I didn’t think much of it. Then, a friend of mine accidentally bought Manly Man’s product instead of mine because they popped up first in his search results. I was used to Manly Man’s ads coming in above mine because he can afford to out-bid me, but he was never even on the first page for any of the key search terms.

I began to do some digging, and what I found wasn’t pretty. There were thousands of reviews, and 100% of them – without exception – were five stars. ALL of them, even those with negative content:

All of this content seems wholly inconsistent with user feedback on his Facebook page. Even to this day, he has a whopping two visitor posts on Facebook while I have almost 30. Also, just like the Facebook likes, with the exception of peak periods like Father’s Day and Valentine’s Day, the growth was linear:

I went back and looked at his Facebook growth, again. This time, I compared it to my own growth and the growth of a few other related businesses that were experiencing peak sales for Valentine’s Day. I took a snapshot every 15 minutes (and would have monitored the growth for longer had the screenshots not filled up my server’s hard drive – whoops). While everyone else was averaging 1-2 likes per hour, he was averaging 11. Also, note how his growth follows a very repetative pattern:

While I can’t PROVE that this is fraudulent, it’s certainly more than suspicious. I decided it was time to contact Shopify and Facebook (again), but this time, I would send a letter via certified mail along with the evidence I’ve shown on this page. The response? You guessed it – Facebook was silent, and Shopify told me that due to privacy policies for their users, they couldn’t tell me anything about internal investigations of users (or even if they intended to launch one). Since then, nothing has changed, and Manly Man has gained over 1000 reviews to his page. Great.

Update as of 06/05/2019: On April 29th, MMC launched “Awesome Gifts Co” as a “gender-neutral” alternative to their current branding. Here’s the growth of their new company’s Facebook page:

Since they announced this on their current Facebook page with 30k “followers,” wouldn’t you expect their new page to have more than absolutely zero likes? Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I’m just sayin. I fully expect this trend to shoot up in a linear fashion in the very near future, though.

Like me, you probably go to Amazon to search for products, rank and sort them based on their review ratings, and pick something from there (and perhaps even buy it somewhere else). You trust reviews, and you depend on customer feedback to guide your purchases. These days, reviews are critically important:

I’ve got some news for you: those reviews are likely fake. I know, I know – you’re a savvy shopper, you’re already aware that Yelp is full of crap, and you can weed through fake reviews. After all, fake reviews can’t be THAT prevalent.

I’m gonna burst your bubble. I didn’t think it was that bad, either, but it’s WAY worse than I thought. Remember, I used to work with a team of white-hat hackers. I’ve seen some really sketchy stuff, but this made me both angry and a little sick to my stomach. This activity even has a name: “astroturfing.” Basically, you’re planting fake grass on your website to make it look better than it really is.

I set up a server to comb the internet for Shopify stores and download customer reviews. One of the most popular review plugins is called “Stamped.io,” and it’s the same plugin Manly Man uses. I gathered over 1M reviews from about 650 stores (which should already raise eyebrows – that’s 15k reviews per store). By default, Stamped creates an “All Reviews” page for stores, and even if there are negative reviews on individual product pages, this page only shows 5-star ratings. 100% of them are five stars. This is a problem since Google uses this data to rank their search results, and it’s damaging to sites that use different platforms.

It gets worse. Wanna know how easy it is to find people to write fake reviews? Head on over to a freelance website like Fiverr.com, search for “review writer,” and find someone in the Philippines who speaks English to write reviews for you. Oh, would you lookie here? While it’s not uncommon to hire Filipino customer service assistants, this is all too suspicious:

Let me tell you how online stores get five-star “verified” reviews – this is where you will lose all faith in the honesty of eCommerce stores:

1. Find a freelancer who speaks English.
2. Have them buy your product, but don’t ship it.
3. They write a review (preferably over a VPN to hide the fact that they’re overseas).
4. Refund their purchase via PayPal plus a commission for their service.
5. Congratulations! You now have a review by a “verified” customer.

Don’t even get me started on the Subreddits, private Discord servers, and Slack channels. There are even databases used to “vet” review writers to make sure you’re not paying someone who will write poor or negative content.

Stamped takes things even further. I signed up for an account awhile back, and it allows you to do a number of things:

• It is possible to change ANYTHING about the review – the rating the person’s name, what they wrote, etc.
• Reviews can be deleted. Most platforms require a manual request to have reviews deleted, but Stamped does not.
• Most platforms provide a way to perform bulk imports for migration purposes, but this opens up the door for obvious abuse. Stamped does something I’ve not seen in other platforms – it lets you mark reviews as “Verified” on import. No need to do the “purchase/review/refund” dance!
• Imported reviews can have their date set, so historical fake reviews can be added.

Since seeing is believing, here ya go:

Still trusting those Amazon reviews . . . ?

What bugs me the most about Manly Man isn’t that they’re my competitor. It isn’t that the owner seems like a spoiled rich kid who decided to rip off and ruin another business just for fun because my cease and desist letter pissed him off (I don’t begrudge his family’s wealth – that’s not the issue). It’s the fact that, like me, he is an Eagle Scout. A Scout is to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. How is what he is doing any of these? The Scout Oath starts with, “On my honor.” Is deceiving customers, creating fake reviews to boost your business, and attempting to destroy a the startup of fellow Scout honorable?

Not once have I paid for a review or given an incentive for someone to leave me positive feedback (it’s actually illegal to provide incentives like coupons, rebates, etc. in exchange for reviews unless you clearly disclose that people have been compensated for their feedback). While friends and family have indeed left me reviews, I only permitted them to do so if they had actually purchased my products. I intentionally picked a review platform that doesn’t allow anonymous reviews because I believe that reviews should be trustworthy for my customers. Heck, I don’t even delete or hide negative comments to posts on my Facebook page, but just go TRY to leave negative comments on his posts – they won’t last long.

I never thought that Say It With Beef would make me a millionaire. As is, between the cost of rent, labor, supplies, insurance, utilities, etc., the additional money I’ve spent on ads in an attempt to beat Manly Man has put me in a hole, and I have yet to make a penny for myself. I just wanted to have a chance at starting my own business and maybe use it as a springboard to fund some of my more tech-related business ideas (like the fact that my website became the first serverless eCommerce website in the world back in January . . . but that’s a different story). I wanted to do well enough that I could help my parents retire earlier. The two best parts about owning Say It With Beef have been hearing from satisfied customers and knowing that my silly little business is the primary source of income for a mom and her two sons (I used to be the main income for three families, actually). She was able to buy a house last year because of Say It With Beef. I wanted to be able to keep providing fun and unique products for my customers, have more employees, and be able to provide a better life for them. Early on, I had met with the local high school to discuss providing funding tutoring programs for any students that work for me, and I had hoped to be able to do that long ago. I have so many products that I had hoped to introduce by now, but I’ve not been able to do so and may never get the chance.

Given an uneven playing field, there’s no amount of money I could ever spend or quality of product I could provide to fight back against Manly Man. With far more funding behind him, all he needs to do is out-bid me on ads and pump his site full of more fake reviews. My only options are to continue doing what I’m doing and slowly bleed money on ads until I have to close my business or go for broke and try to fight back legally. The second option certainly isn’t inexpensive, but since it’s the only choice that doesn’t have the guaranteed result of failure, it’s my best bet. It just makes me sad, frustrated, angry, and even feel like a failure that I lived in my car for three years to save up enough money so I could take this shot in life only to have someone – a fellow Eagle Scout, no less – take it all away by playing dirty, and there’s really not much I can do to stop him. I haven’t given up hope and I’m not done fighting. I don’t think Say It With Beef HAS to be a lost cause, but unless something changes soon or I can get some help, the future doesn’t look very promising.

I’m sure we can all agree that review fraud and astroturfing activities hurt consumer confidence as well as any small business (online or physical) that is trying to play by the rules. Know what else it can hurt? Public safety. What if an Amazon seller pumps up the reviews of a toy for infants even though it is made out of flimsy or potentially unsafe material? You may have gotten a great deal on that five-star rated bumper-jumper for you baby, but if the door clamp is made out of cheap plastic and winds up breaking . . . (Oh, shoot – I literally just made that up on the fly. Turns out it really happened).

How about poorly-made electronics? These days, USB and laptop chargers (and even the cables themselves) require VERY specific circuitry in order to safely support rapid-charging technologies. Ever seen a lithium fire? They’re not exactly pretty. Nor is that five-star review that led you to buy an uncertified charger.

This is a huge deal, and it goes far beyond my little business of selling meat flowers. We need to fight back, and I need your help if we have any hope of succeeding. For the sake of Say It With Beef and hundreds of other small business who are trying to be honest and play by the rules, please consider helping with the information provided below.

For a big company, Google tends to be surprisingly responsive. However, they sure don’t make finding submission pages very easy unless you pay for their G-Suite business services. This seems to be the best link to submit a complaint: Report Legal Removal Form Once on this page, here’s what you need to do: Fill out your contact information. Under “Allegedly infringing URLs,” provide the following (click “Add additional” to provide more than one): https://manlymanco.com/a/review/all https://facebook.com/manlymanco/community In the first field, paste the contents of this document. In the second field, paste the contents of this document. To go a step further, there’s always snail-mail, and sending this letter may help to get their attention – just make sure to change the fields in [brackets]: Google, Inc. Legal Department 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043

Being a Canadian company, Shopify is actually pretty easy to reach and rather responsive. The easiest way is to use this form: Shopify Acceptable Use Violation Form Once on this page, here’s what you need to do: From the drop-down, select “Illegal Activities.” Fill out your contact information. For the “Primary store link,”, provide https://manlymanco.com. For the “Links to the Materials being reported” boxes, provide the following: https://manlymanco.com/a/review/all https://facebook.com/manlymanco/community In the “Description” field, paste the contents of this document. It would be hardcore if you sent a letter like this one to Shopify, but remember: they’re in Canada. To send a letter there, you need to add three stamps to the envelope. Also, make sure to change the fields in [brackets]: Shopify, Inc. Legal Department 150 Elgin Street, 8th Floor Ottawa, ON, CA K2P 1L4

Facebook is a tricky beast to contact – they’re not very responsive, they don’t make it easy to find any actual submission forms online, there’s no “email” addresses that they use, etc. From what I can tell, this is the best way to reach them: Report Submission Form Once on this page, here’s what you need to do: Click the last item, “Other abuse.” A new radio selector will appear above the first block asking if you have a Facebook account or not. Select “No” even if you DO have a Facebook account. Otherwise, you won’t be able to submit actual details, and Facebook will instruct you to use things like their “Report Page” links (which are basically useless). Under “Links (URLs) to the content,” provide the following: https://facebook.com/manlymanco/community https://manlymanco.com/a/review/all For the date, use 2/5/2017 (the date MMC’s Facebook went live). In the “Description” field, paste in the contents of this document. If you wanted to be AWESOME, you can also send that as an actual letter to Facebook’s legal department. Here’s their address: Facebook, Inc. Legal Department 1601 Willow Road Menlo Park, CA 94025

This might be the best bet of getting something done from a government perspective. The AG is the appropriate agency for cracking down on things like this. If you want to submit a complaint via the web, start here: Business Complaint Form On to the form. Fill out the “Your Information” section with all of your personal information. Then, use the following for the “Business Information (Complaint Against)” part: Company Name: Company Address: Company City: Company State: Zip Code: (+4): Area Code: Phone Number: In the “Comment” section, use this document. Don’t forget to change the red text! Fill out as much of the “Additional Information About You (optional)” section as you would like. Select “Yes” that you affirm your submission to be accurate. The final checkbox is up to you. If you select “Yes,” that give the AG’s office permission to share your complaint with Manly Man. This MAY include your name. If you select no, the AG’s office will not share the complaint with Manly Man. It is obviously more helpful if you select “Yes,” and there’s shouldn’t be any problem with doing so, but it’s your call. To go old skool, you can send the print version. Fill and print out this PDF – I’ve already taken care of most of the fields. Then, print out this document to include with the form (don’t forget to change the red text!) and mail it to the following: Public Inquiry Unit Office of the Attorney General P.O. Box 944255 Sacramento, CA 94244-2550

Surprise, surprise – as a government agency, FTC’s form is a bit of a pain, and there’s no section that fits this scenario quite right. I hit up their support via their in-browser chat, and they recommended starting here: FTC Complaint Form Now, the fun part – the unending form: Don’t click any checkboxes – just click “Next.” The next page is just informational – click “Continue.” On the next page, just add the date “07/31/2017” to the first field and click “Next.” Click “Continue” on the next page. Select “Yes” on this page for the question, “Do you have information about the company or individual?” and use the following information: Name of comp: Address: Apt/PO Box: N/A City: State: Zip: Email: Website: Phone Number: Extension: N/A Comp Rep First Name: Comp Rep Last Name: Comp Rep Title/Pos: On the next page, provide as much of your contact information as you are comfortable with providing. Do NOT select “Yes” for the question, “Are you filing a complaint on behalf of someone else?” or fill in the text box under, “If you are filing on behalf of your small business or organization.” On the page entitled, “Please tell us what happened,” use this document. You’re finally done! Click “Submit.”

***Update: I’ve been told that the Canadian Competition Bureau is responding to say that this issue originates in the US, so it is outside their jurisdiction. Since it is occurring on a store hosted on Shopify (a Canadian company), I believe it is still a matter that involves them. If they get enough letters, they might take action. However, if they reply and start asking why they’re getting the same letter from so many people, you might just respond by saying that Manly Man is on Shopify, Shopify is Canadian, and the Bureau needs to investigate the review fraud being allowed to occur on Shopify’s systems.*** Oh, Canada – sometimes, they make things so much easier than the US government. The Competition Bureau is basically the equivalent of the FTC, and they have been cracking down on fake reviews for several years before the FTC. Since Shopify is a Canadian company, filing a complaint here is definitely worthwhile. Start at this page: Competition Bureau Complaint Form Next, the form: Select “No” under the question regarding if you have filed a previous complaint. Fill out as much contact information you are willing to provide. Please make sure it is YOUR information – don’t reference Say It With Beef (we’ve filed our own complaint). Under the section “Company or Person Complained Against,” use the following information: Last Name: N/A First Name: N/A Title: N/A Company Name: Street Address: Apartment: N/A City: Postal/Zip Code: Province/State: Country: Contact Phone: N/A Company Phone: Fax Number: N/A Email Address: Website: In the section, “Details of Your Complaint,” use this document. Select “No” under “Are you a victim?” Skip the field asking for the dollar amount. Select “No” where it asks about attaching electronic files. You’re done! Click “Submit.”

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Just a few months ago, I added a review feature to the product pages of my site. The reason it took me so long to add this is because a) most review platforms are STOOPID expensive, and b) I had the requirement that the platform must require users to authenticate, and it would need to support various platforms (Google, Facebook, Twitter, email address, etc). Every platform I found allows anonymous reviews, and even before Manly Man was a problem, this was something I didn’t want to allow because it decreases the validity of the content. I FINALLY found something that works, though. If you’d be willing to write something, head on over to my product pages – while I can’t compete with the 3.5k MMC has, anything would definitely help. As always, I will ONLY approve reviews from people I can verify as having actually purchased.

There are a few things I really need to help keep Say It With Beef afloat. I don’t think the business is a lost cause (not by a long shot), but I definitely need some help if I am to continue:

1. I had a marketing agency working for me last year, but they cost WAY too much money and didn’t show a meaningful ROI. I really need help with marketing, but I’m not exactly rolling in spare cash. If there’s a freelancer or smaller agency willing to give me a hand with the understanding that I can pay more once their efforts pay off, it’s something I definitely need.
2. Between the normal expenses that any small business faces and trying to out-bid Manly Man on ads, I’ve spent a LOT of money, and there’s not much more that my family can provide to help. If you’re an investor or someone who would be interested in partnering with me to take Say It With Beef to the next level, let me know.
3. I’ve not had much luck finding a laywer to help me with my case. Honestly, none of them ever respond. Maybe they were just too busy or this isn’t in their area of practice. If you know of someone who could help, that would be great.

Have anything else that could help? Do you know someone on the inside at one of these companies who could lend a hand? Maybe it’s possible to get media attention on my issue to expose this problem beyond Say It With Beef. I’d certainly be interested in your feedback. This contact form goes DIRECTLY to my personal inbox, so feel free to drop a message.