Sundance Vacations would like to bill itself as a purveyor of wholesale and discount vacations. But on the internet, it is widely described as a sleazy hard-sell telemarketer selling sales presentations.

Companies are increasingly aggressive — perhaps belligerent is the better word — in defending their online reputation. There's evidence that Sundance Vacations has taken this trend to a new extreme through forging court documents in an effort to suppress criticism.

Matt Haughey has the story. When Sundance demanded that critical posts be taken down from Metafilter, and provided an apparent court order from Mississippi, Matt did something very rare and special — he exercised critical thinking. Matt noted discrepancies in the purported court order, crowdsourced a request to determine whether the case actually existed, and eventually did the legwork himself by calling the clerk's office. The result:

Today (Tuesday) I called a clerk in the Hinds County Chancery Court office. They asked me to fax them a copy of the court order so they could verify the document. I did as requested and a few hours later got a call back from the office saying it was not a real document from their court. The case numbers on the first page are from an unrelated case that took place last year. The clerk said they found a case from August 21, 2014 that used similar language but had different plaintiffs and defendants, but the same lawyers on page 3. In their opinion, it seemed someone grabbed a PDF from a different case and copy/pasted new details to it before sending it on to me.

Naughty, naughty, naughty. And so very reckless.

I've written to Sundance Vacations, a rep there who wrote to Matt before, the account that sent the court order this time, and Sundance's attorney of record on the order, asking them all for comment. I'm moving on to seek comment from the opposing lawyers in that apparently cut-and-pasted case. I'll report more if I learn it. Matt explains that the fake order came from a gmail account; Sundance may attempt to distance itself and deny responsibility for that account.

For now, Sundance Vacations is about to learn about the Streisand Effect. BoingBoing has picked up the story, and more will follow. And could there be consequences for using forged court documents in interstate commerce to suppress commercial criticism? Gosh, what an interesting question . . . .

Updated: On its Facebook page, Sundance Vacations confirms the prior email to Matt but denies it sent the recent one with the apparently forged documents, as predicted above.

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