Everyone knows that social media services are facing serious issues in the battle to detect and remove fake profiles. Twitter has created clear policies about impersonation, trademark violation and hate speech – but action is sorely absent even when fake accounts are reported.

Two troll accounts @Amlia_Catherine (“Catherine Crandall”) and @AmliaApp (“Amlia Wellness App”), claim to represent me and my company. For the past month they’ve been churning out abusive commentary, LGBTQ attacks, even requesting a meeting on my behalf, and have volunteered me to speak at events, write articles, etc.

I get it - Twitter is busy and I’m a small operator, but if your rules and policies are important, shouldn’t enforcing violations be a priority? I’m on Twitter for business purposes, and it’s clear that the intent of this troll campaign is to harm my business. A Twitter rep met with me recently to discuss advertising for my company’s soon to be re-launched software product, but where is the support when it comes to helping to guard my reputation on your platform?

Following Twitter guidelines, I have reported these troll accounts as impersonation, trademark violation, hate speech – and generally for just being fake. I’ve submitted scans of my driver’s license, our trademark registration certificate, my business card, a signed letter attesting to be the legal representative of my business. Twitter has not acted, even when these violations have been fully documented and my own identity verified.

Do I have any idea why these troll accounts are targeting me? You betcha!

You’ll find plenty of stories about who’s behind this with a Google search "Mined Minds New York Times." The first search result should be this article “They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia, Now They Say it Was a Scam.” Several exposés have been written this year, as well as a thorough seven-episode podcast called Codeburst. I hired this outfit to build our product concept on the recommendation of a business acquaintance in Seattle’s startup community. I became committed to the idea that I would be doing good by helping people who wanted to help themselves. I trusted the couple’s claims that they would oversee the entire project and apply all their years of technology experience.

Through these news reports I learned that employees had been unfairly fired; I had been told an alternative story: that people had been re-deployed to "another project," or had taken "another job" outside of Mined Minds. Mined Minds interfered with people’s lives and livelihoods. These hardworking people who had trusted in the Mined Minds Foundation mission have reached out to me one by one and I’ve heard individual stories of shaming, deception, party culture and bad behavior. I had been deliberately misinformed about most aspects of how the two principals of Mined Minds operated their business.

Mined Minds interfered with people’s lives and livelihoods.

Sixty or so former students and apprentices launched a class-action lawsuit, which was halted after it was recognized that there would be no payout because Mined Minds had been stripped of assets, and the plaintiffs (economically disadvantaged people in Appalachia) could not fund their lawyer's expenses. The endeavor received hundreds of thousands of dollars as a non -profit from public grants. The money remains unaccounted for and Mined Minds has refused to release its financials.

Concluding that the time and money I spent with Mined Minds was a lost cause, I was nonetheless astonished when they would not turn over the code they had been paid to produce. Instead, the principals of Mined Minds offered to provide me with my work product in exchange for a confidentiality agreement. I would have been contractually bound to speak “neutrally or positively” about my experience working with them. The principals specifically demanded contractual language which would preclude me from testifying in “current or future lawsuits.” I declined to accede to this extortion.

The work product which the principals were holding hostage has no value, although I paid a considerable sum for it. So instead, I have opted to tell my story. I first went to the West Virginia Attorney General, not with a consumer complaint, but to attest to the behaviors I had observed. I promised that I would not speak of details on social media, so that’s all I have to say about that.

Mined Minds principal Amanda Laucher has retaliated by creating impersonation Twitter accounts...showing her true sensibilities. Over 100 published tweets like these pretend to speak for me.





Twitter has been asked to remove the fake accounts and I have every confidence that they will eventually rise to the task of enforcing their own rules about trademark protection, impersonation, fake accounts and LGBTQ attacks.

Although I’ve had to start over from scratch after working with Mined Minds, I feel fortunate to have teamed up with a talented and highly experienced software engineer. Amlia is progressing quickly toward re-launch.

I have not wanted to make this story about me – the people most harmed in this debacle were guys like Billyjack Buzzard.

Shining a light on my Twitter troll is the best way I know to encourage Twitter to do what’s right.

I look forward to Twitter’s attention to this matter.