Dennis Toeppen enraged the Internet last weekend when his lawyer threatened to sue a reddit moderator. It didn't take long for the lawyer and Toeppen to back off the threats once they realized what they were in for. Even as Suburban Express was trying to de-escalate the situation, Internet vigilantes virtually attacked the company—and Toeppen personally—taking down the company's website and stealing Toeppen's online identity.

James Long, Suburban Express' lawyer, said in a phone conversation that the blow-up over the threatened reddit lawsuit has been an "eye-opener" for him. He had no previous experience in dealing with social media like reddit. He was at a White Sox game with his son on Thursday night as his letter to redditor Murph Finnicum was starting to go viral, and Long was out of the office when Ars first reported the story.

In an e-mail discussion, Toeppen said Suburban Express was not only dropping threats of a lawsuit against redditor Murph Finnicum, but the company would drop all of the 126 lawsuits filed this year against customers. (An earlier count placing the number of suits did not include those in which the company's name had been misspelled.)

"We decided over the weekend to voluntarily drop all of the lawsuits in Ford County," Toeppen told Ars. "Motions to dismiss were filed Monday." A report in the News-Gazette confirms that all of Suburban Express' pending small claims suits have been dropped. A review of those cases by Ars shows that at least some of them have been "dismissed with prejudice"—meaning that they cannot be re-filed.

"We recognized that this legal approach of trying to uphold our agreement with customers carries with it a negative perception that we do not intend," Toeppen said. "Instead, we will look at other ways of communicating and upholding the terms and conditions of our ticket-purchase agreement, which is designed to ensure convenience and efficiency for all of our customers. We are currently working on refining the terms and conditions of our agreement."

Toeppen said that the company's wave of lawsuits was the result of a backup of collection workflow and not an attempt to turn a small claims court into a profit center. He explained that the policies used by the company—a "virtual" bus company that he founded in 1983 when he was 19 and an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois—were designed to make getting busses boarded and to their destinations as quickly and efficiently as possible. All of the company's buses and drivers are provided by contracted charter companies (though Toeppen also owns his own charter company, which is a Suburban Express contractor).

Hitting the Internet’s windshield

This realization came too late to prevent Toeppen's digital excoriation. Over the weekend, Toeppen's personal website and those of his businesses, including his bus company Suburban Express, were defaced. The sites were offline briefly but have since been restored. Toeppen's reddit account was also apparently hijacked, and it was used to post to reddit's University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign subreddit in a thread called "password for dennis-toeppen is dennis-toeppen." The thread included posts from the account about his penis size.

Given the level of debate Toeppen is alleged to have stooped to on reddit—including registering throwaway accounts from a computer on his company's network and posting comments calling reddit users "virgins"—this may not come as much of a surprise.

Toeppen exchanged e-mails with Ken White, a Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer blogger at Popehat.com. White had been contacted by a number of individuals targeted by legal threats from Toeppen's company for online defamation. "When you double, triple, and quadruple down on online dickery," White wrote in his post on the exchange, "you place yourself beyond easy reputational redemption, and instead face the full force of the Streisand Effect."

The Streisand Effect, for the uninitiated, is the term assigned to the blow-back experienced when one tries to use threats to censor others. "What's remarkable about this case is how rapidly the Streisand Effect unfolded," White wrote. "It went from zero to 'catastrophic reputation damage' in less than a week."

Toeppen did not comment on what lessons he has learned about social media from this episode, or about the hacking of his personal and company sites. But based on his conversation with Ars over e-mail, he seems to have become more careful with his responses.

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