Have you heard of ePerks? They are one of the many new alternatives to the traditional multiple listing services run by Realtors. There are many great new alternatives to consumers to find real estate on the Net. Some of them have much more powerful tools for free than I pay high dollars to get as an agent.
EPerks apparently isn’t one of them. They have a bad reputation spread over the net. One blogger Vlad Zablotskyy reviewed them on his Go Beyond MLS website. He had numerous agents comment on his post about their experiences with ePerks. EPerks didn’t like this and have sued Vlad. Their claim – that Mr Zablotskyy made up the negative comments about their company. It’s an absurd claim as there were hundreds of comments both negative and positive. Many of the positive ones and ones critical of Vlad came from IP addresses apparently related to ePerks.
This is truly a case of bullying. In fact BrokerScience.com posted a recording of Ben Behrouzi the owner of ePerks threatening an employee of a former company. He said “My new goal in life is going to become to ruin your name across this entire East Bay” That sounds like a bully to me.
It would appear from IP addresses that someone from ePerks that put a false post on Answers.com that Vlad was a child molester. It is scary to think that simply posting an honest opinion on a little known website could have your good reputation trashed in a way that would be very hard to recover from. Sounds more like e-Jerks to me.
Of course, I don’t know if the allegations against ePerks are true, they may not be. I do know that how they have handled this is a public relations nightmare. I never saw any of the negative press against them until they started bullying Vlad. I don’t think much of them now, mainly from their actions, not anything Vlad did.
What happened to freedom of speech? I not only write on my blog, I often comment on other blogs. Is the threat of being sued going to damper blogging and comments? If you want to read more about this, Greg Swan wrote an article about it with lots of links at the Bloodhound Blog.
You can help preserve free speech on the net by donating to Vlad Zablotskyy’s legal aid fund on the bloodhound blog. I did.
PS: Don’t be afraid to comment on my blog, ePerks doesn’t read it. Just click the comments link.
Happy investing,
Ned
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4 responses so far ↓
1 Recruiting Services (1 comments.) // Sep 12, 2008 at 9:10 am
good post, thanks for this!
2 Jonathan Benya (10 comments.) // Sep 25, 2008 at 11:49 pm
These guys used to call me all the time, and I couldn’t get the to quit! About 6 months ago I finally said to them
“I will never give a dime to a company that deals with freedom of speech like you do with Vlad Zablotskyy, I refuse to associate my company with a company like yours”.
Funny thing…. they never called me again!
3 Ned // Sep 26, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Hey Jonathan,
Thanks for stopping by. You’d think they would learn that this is not the way to create good PR.
By the way, I had a spike in readership when I posted this. I think it got stumbled. I hope in my small way I can contribute to this story can going viral. Have you written about It?
4 Jonathan Benya (10 comments.) // Sep 29, 2008 at 9:49 am
stories about this have caused a couple of websites to see readership spikes. I was going to blog about it, but I was reading a post on agentgenius where they asked people to not write further on the subject because they did not want to further complicate Vlad’s legal situation. I feel really bad for the guy, but I don’t want to risk hurting his defense.