Complainonline.net and FastMediate.com Gone

Harris Black, the convicted sex offender on the run from a Canadian arrest warrant for rape, hiding out in Thailand on an expired visa, has had his little foray into the extortion game last barely a month before I — with the help of hundreds of his victims whom I e-mailed warning them not to pay Harris' attempts at black mail; whom I encouraged to contact Harris' sites' service provider, SoftLayer — had it shut down.

The amazing thing is that I ultimately only have Harris Black to thank for the results I achieved. Without his help at every step of the way, none of this would have been possible:

• Thanks to Harris Black for leaving that comment on my blog. When I mentioned that my Virtual Assistant site was up and running, Harris said he was going to be messing with my attempts to start an online business. Thus, I knew to keep an eye out for typical Harris antics.
• Thanks to Harris Black for leading me directly to ComplainOnline.net by putting up a post about me there saying (more coarsely and with poorer grammar) that I was a bad virtual assistant.
• Thanks to Harris Black for letting me know without any doubt that he was the one running ComplainOnline.net (instead of just having an account there and posting "complaints" and "comments" on somebody else's site) by setting up the site so that wherever anybody typed "Harris Black" into a comment box, those words were replaced with "Hulk Hogan".
• And, of course thanks to Harris Black for so kindly publishing the e-mail addresses of every single one of the people he was trying to extort money from on ComplainOnline.net, so that I could contact them personally and warn them not to pay any money, and to instead contact the FBI, RCMP, SoftLayer, and even the Thai Police. (Based on replies to my e-mails, about 50 of you took the time to contact those entities. Hopefully many more of you did the same yet did not take the time to let me know.)

Anyway, in his defense, Harris has called me childish names, called my wife childish names, called my mother childish names... and, well... that's all.

In return for the name calling, I stopped Harris' little money-making scheme, shut down a website that was slandering hundreds of innocent people, and saved several of the more gullible people Harris contacted hundreds of dollars, and hopefully put Harris squarely on the radar of American, Canadian, and Thai law enforcement agencies in the process.

Oh, and of course, hopefully I've given Harris' cash flow such a smack that he'll be stuck eating nothing but vegetable fried rice and bottled water for the next 6 months.

Thank you to everyone who participated. Again, to each of Harris' victims, I'm sorry that you got involved in the low-brow, low-intelligence, low-yield game that Harris decided to play. But your help in spoiling it has contributed to the most entertaining and rewarding undertaking I've had in many a month.

In the end, Harris, as always: you've been unfailingly amusing, you've been utterly harmless, and you've ultimately left me with a smile. Another win.

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By the way, if you were one of the victims of the "complainonline/ fastmediate" scam and ever are contacted by another website in another attempt to extort money, please leave a comment here to let me know immediately. Thanks.