You might think that Dennis Toeppen, the one-time domain squatter and owner of weekend shuttle service Suburban Express, would have learned valuable lessons about social media by now. Toeppen became the focus of much Internet anger and earned the attention of activist attorneys and the Illinois Attorney General after threatening to sue a reddit moderator. Around the same time, his personal and business websites were all apparently defaced.

But if you thought that he was done, you'd be wrong. Toeppen has once again taken to the Web, raising the stakes in his attack against a social-media critic of his company. Some reddit users claim that he is again trolling reddit with "throwaway" reddit accounts as part of his campaign to silence critics. And there has been speculation that Toeppen defaced his own sites in an effort to make himself look like a victim.

The full Streisand

Toeppen's activities have already drawn the interest of the Illinois Attorney General's Office in addition to the massive amounts of bad press. The problems began when Toeppen's company assessed a $500 "liquidated damages" fine to passenger Jeremy Leval after Leval recounted an incident on a bus contracted by Suburban Express on March 31. Leval said that the driver had yelled at an international student boarding the bus for not following his instructions, reportedly telling her, "If you don’t understand English, you don’t belong at the University of Illinois or any ‘American’ University."

Toeppen took to reddit to counter Leval's claims and said that someone had apologized for the incident—but he went on to claim that Leval was only saying bad things about his company because he wanted to start a competing business. When reddit users responded negatively to his posts—and to trolls allegedly posted under fake accounts from Suburban Express' IP address that called the contributors to the subreddit virgins and compulsive masturbators—he tracked down the identity of reddit moderator Murph Finnicum and had his lawyer send a letter threatening a lawsuit if negative comments about Suburban Express were not removed.

In midst of the blowback from that threat—which included the apparent defacement of Toeppen's personal site as well as sites for Suburban Express and his charter bus company—Toeppen moved to drop over 125 small-claims lawsuits he had filed against customers over a failure to follow his company's policies. Some of those sued by Toeppen's company or hit with punitive "fines" charged to their credit cards by the company say they were singled out because they wrote negative reviews of the company's service. Toeppen said in an email that the company does not retain credit card data, so fines can't be assessed directly against customers' accounts.

The suits, which were all filed in Illinois' Ford County—chosen by Toeppen, in his words, because of its "wide open court calendar, easy parking and service with a smile"—were dropped after Toeppen and his lawyer were contacted by Ken White, the Los Angeles defense attorney and legal blogger at Popehat.com. White had asked if Toeppen was aware of the "Streisand Effect"—the blowback that usually accompanies attempts to silence speech online. "When you double, triple, and quadruple down on online dickery," White wrote in his post to Popehat about the case, "you place yourself beyond easy reputational redemption, and instead face the full force of the Streisand Effect."

Quintupling down on dickery

But one case still remains in play—that of Jeremy Leval, who has continued to speak out about Toeppen's tactics and who is pursuing a case against Toeppen himself. This weekend, Toeppen relaunched his online attacks against Leval, posting a page to Suburban Express' website that recounted the March 31 incident from Toeppen's point of view and calling Leval "nothing but a bullying, self-important brat." The page reiterated Toeppen's claim that Leval was trying to smear Suburban Express to help his own since-aborted plans for a student ride-sharing site, saying, "A blogger suggested that Leval may have been motivated to harass Suburban Express as a means of furthering his business interests."

Toeppen's post didn't end there. He also recounted a conversation that Leval and his girlfriend allegedly had with a driver from another transportation service. "On May 12, 2013, Jeremy Leval and his girlfriend interacted with an EAC driver at Armory around 2:50pm. Jeremy approached the driver and asked if he had heard of Suburban Express. Jeremy went on to boast that he is the guy who is causing Suburban Express lots of trouble. This makes [me] question Jeremy Leval's motivations. Is he a selfless individual fighting for the rights of the oppressed, or is he a self-promoting, troublemaking, attention-seeker?"

To cap it all off, Toeppen posted a list of Leval's blog and reddit usernames, including "Sweethackinjustice (a particularly interesting username choice in light of the fact that parts of our website were apparently hacked a few weeks ago)."

The content regarding Leval's conversation was then posted to reddit by someone using the account "notmyregular8account" with the addition of "Posting from a new account so I don't get tangled up in this. (Suburban Express) seems to be able to figure out who everyone is." Leval claims that the account was actually set up by Toeppen himself, following his previous pattern of setting up throwaway reddit user names and using the account names as the passwords. That accusation led to a long string of taunts from the account, including "You sound an awful lot like sweethackinjustice, one of Jeremy's many throwaways. Jeremy, congratulate yourself for graduating with your MBA and then go to sleep."

Toeppen e-mailed Ars last week to say that he had not been able to respond to messages because he had been hiking the Grand Canyon and had left all his electronics checked at a hotel, but he never addressed the questions about what had been done to the sites or whether law enforcement had been contacted.