

Kleargear destroyed the credit of customers who complained about getting ripped off, then disappeared when a court ordered them to pay restitution — now they have a new US address, shared with a scammy auction site, raising questions about what other ripoffs the company's owners are involved with.

The new address, 427 North Tatnall Street, Wilmington, Delaware 19801-2230, is also home to notorious penny auction site Zbiddy, whose customers have complained for years about paying for goods that never arrived. As Techdirt's Tim Cushing puts it: "It appears that whoever actually runs KlearGear (whether it's Havaco Direct, Chenal Media or French company Descoteaux Boutiques) may have a fistful of scammy companies under his purview — or at least has the dubious fortune of choosing the same remailer address as Zbiddy. KlearGear may be completely unrelated to Zbiddy, but customers of both suffer from the same form of abuse: not receiving the products they've paid for."

Various attempts have been made to scrub KlearGear's reputation since news of its $3,500 bad review fee surfaced. A very thorough expose of KlearGear's many corporate figureheads posted at RipOff Report notes that someone using the account "Havaco Direct" attempted to hire a freelancer to crank out 10 glowing reviews (all from separate email/IP addresses) and post them at ResellerRatings.com. (A 2011 request from Havaco Direct asks for the generation of 240 unique email addresses created by 240 unique IP addresses — itself more than a little shady.) A quick scan of ResellerRating reviews pre-dating 2013's Streisanding shows KlearGear's inability to fulfill orders has been a problem (or not, if you're just running a scam) since day one. Also of interest are recent DMCA takedown notices sent by a supposed representative of KlearGear with the made-up-on-the-spot name of "Consumer Guardian." Since the beginning of this month, it has sent out three notices to Google asking for the delisting of the expansive Ripoff Report noted above, further research into the company's inner workings by a blogger at Blagnet and Ken White's post at Popehat. So far, every request has been turned down. Searching for "Consumer Guardian" gets you the metaphoric phone book, which is presumably the impetus behind the bland name currently abusing the DMCA system.

KlearGear Revamps Website; New Address Traces Back To Scammy Penny Auction Site [Tim Cushing/Techdirt]