Dennis Toeppen, infamous former cyber squatter and current owner of the Illinois shuttle bus service Suburban Express, rose to further notoriety last year for his attempts to silence social media critics on reddit and Yelp through legal threats and alleged online intimidation. Those critics were responding to Suburban Express's policy of suing students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in an out-of-county court to coerce them into paying penalties when they didn't follow draconian passenger policies. Unsurprisingly, the situation didn't work out well for Toeppen, resulting in a massive Streisand Effect (including drawing attention from Ken “Popehat” White, who offered pro bono legal help to a redditor threatened with a lawsuit).

Yesterday, Toeppen added another chapter to his strange story when he was arrested in Champaign, Illinois on two counts of "Harassment through electronic communications," a class B misdemeanor in Illinois, according to a spokesperson for the Lake County State's Attorney's Office. By this morning, he had posted the $10,000 bond and was free awaiting arraignment, according to a spokesperson for the Champaign County Sheriff's Office where Toeppen was booked.

Toeppen frequently posts “dirt” about his competitors and detractors on his company’s website, and he actively defends his reputation on Yelp and reddit by engaging posters of negative reviews. In last year's public incident, Toeppen eventually dropped his legal threats against a redditor and then had over 100 lawsuits against students that he filed in Ford County dismissed. (Toeppen later filed to vacate their dismissal, however, so that he could re-file them elsewhere.) He has continued to aggressively go after people who express negative opinions since, as Na’ame Firestone of Oakland, California recently experienced on Yelp:

July 8, 2014 10:30 PM

This business owner is really freaky- BEWARE!!!

All day today he has been editing and re-editing his reply- I know that because every time he edits his reply I get notification e-mail. So far today I got EIGHTEEN notices- eighteen!!!! The guy is obsessed with me and I'm starting to get worried.

He took out the names he called me in his initial response, such as "liar" "Nutcase" and the such. He also took out the line where he accused my girl and her friend as having SIX wheelchairs with them...

But what really freaks me out is that he ended his last comment with a question:

"ps Is this you?"

And then he pasted this link, which is TOTALLY not related to my Yelp review:

"usatoday30.usatoday.com/…; [Link broken] HE ACTUALLY GOOGLED MY NAME OR SOMETHING. He is stalking me!! HELP!!!! DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY or you'll be stalked- be warned!!!! July 8. 2014

It gets even scarier...

I just got a message from him:

Hi Naama, Dennis T. sent you a message on Yelp:

Subject: RE: Your Review

"By the way, what is all that trash in your driveway on the google street view of your house? You seem a little wacko."

A look at other reviews on Yelp shows that Toeppen frequently goes back and rewrites responses to negative reviews. On a review dating back to 2010, his current comments have a post date of June 21, 2014.

Apparently, this time at least one target of Toeppen’s tactics documented the situation well enough to get misdemeanor charges filed. According to Lake County Circuit Court’s database, the charges filed against Toeppen were based on incidents on September 23, 2013 and January 10, 2014.

Update: In an email response to Ars, Lake County State's Attorney's Office spokesperson Cynthia Vargas said that Toeppen's next court date is August 1st. Because there hasn't yet been a preliminary hearing on the case,"at this time no other information can be released," Vargas told Ars. "The Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office cannot make extrajudicial comments."