Team Prenda Not Only Still Shaking Down People, But Also Threatening To Tell Their Neighbors About Porn Habits

from the they-just-don't-quit dept

The first step in this process is to conduct what is referred to as a 'pre-complaint investigation.' The purpose of this step is to gather evidence about who used your Internet account to steal from our client. The list of possible suspects includes you, members of your household, your neighbors (if you maintain an open wi-fi connection) and anyone who might have visited your house. In the coming days we will contact these individuals to investigate whether they have any knowledge of the acts described in my client's prior letter.

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It would appear that while Team Prenda is in denial mode when talking to the press, they're still going strong in the shakedown game. As highlighted by Fight Copyright Trolls, late last week, Paul Duffy was still signing letters sent out from "Anti-Piracy Law Group" -- the name cooked up as a replacement after Prenda's name became toxic. And the letters were sent out the dayJudge Wright's complete smackdown of the whole shakedown business. Even more ridiculous is that the latest batch of threat letters try to speed up the process by telling people they're going to contact your neighbors about what they believe are your porn habits . This is classic stuff, right out the playbook of John Steele/Paul Hansmeier and the like: when they run into trouble, rather than deal with it, they pile on another layer of tricks. In this case, one of the key issues that was raised in other cases, including the case in front of Judge Wright, was Prenda lawyer Brett Gibb's failure to have real proof that an account holder was the party involved in the downloading, especially in cases of open WiFi. While Gibbs had weakly claimed that the house was too far away from others for the WiFi to reach the neighbors, opposing lawyers (and then Judge Wright himself) pointed out that a simple look at Google Maps showed this was clearly untrue.Team Prenda appears to now be using that to their advantage:The short form of this is: "pay up, or we contact your family, friends and neighbors to tell them you've been downloading freaky porn -- whether or not it's true."I can't imagine that this is going to end well for Duffy, Steele and Hansmeier, no matter how self-assured they like to appear. At best, this is an attempt to squeeze a bit more money out of this whole process before it's completely shut down, but given that the walls are almost certainly closing in on them, continuing to operate in this manner (and even stepping it up in some ways) isn't going to look good to those who are now investigating the matter.

Filed Under: john steele, paul duffy, paul hansmeier

Companies: anti-piracy law group, prenda, prenda law