I have written previously here and here about the extensive level of fraud in the on-line divorce
industry.
The uncontested no-fault
divorce industry is definitely moving away from lawyers and now even away from
main-street document preparers and towards on-line divorce
preparation services, such as NetDivorce.
This is substantially a price and convenience based movement that is driven by
the consumer. The economies of the Internet, the ease of filing one's own
documents at court and advances in user-friendly software that can easily handle
the huge volume of paperwork associated with modern divorce means that on-line
divorce is a growth industry. There is money to be made in on-line divorce.
Unfortunately, this is a financial truism which has already been recognized by
the usual sort of on-line con-man. While
it is true that the industry is subject to laws concerning false advertising and
criminal fraud, as a whole, it is largely unregulated. There is no effective
licensing or bonding. There are no published industry standards of practice.
There is no professional association of on-line divorce providers. And on-line divorce, having been an early
entry in the world of e-commerce, has a 15-year head-start on accumulating
low-quality hucksters and confidence tricksters
 Jason McClain is the Founder and CEO of MyDivorcePapers.com.
In 2002, after more than 50,000 hours of building and cultivating businesses, Jason founded MyDivorcePapers.com as an outlet for his entrepreneurial expertise. Jason has previously worked with companies like Home Depot, Dish Network, AARP, and ADT, yet Jason finds himself drawn to creating helpful on-line companies.
Jason is well known for his outstanding integrity and character. Coupled with his skills in business development and consulting, Jason creates innovative companies that provide beneficial services for the public.
Jason's exemplary character has earned him the great honor of an Honorary Doctorate of Divinity from the Pentecostal Bible College. Jason is a leader by title, but more importantly, believes in being a leader by example.
MyDivorcePapers.com
(MDP) has been a prominent on-line divorce provider for several years. MDP claims to have been in the
business since 2002, though for many years after that date, it only sold (for
$25) packets of blank
divorce papers that could have been downloaded free from court and Judicial
Council websites. No doubt, that is from where MDP downloaded them for free.
MDP
basically took advantage of people who did not know the blank forms were freely
available. It is only in recent years that MDP has actually
offered an on-line divorce forms preparation service. MDP has
been a part of NetDivorce's
matrix analysis of the top California on-line divorce
sites for a few years. Notwithstanding its past, we have considered
MDP a worthy current competitor and its
CEO a stand-up
businessman, as he himself constantly claims to be.
As I mentioned above, on-line divorce is susbtantially driven by price and
convenience, but a large part of the convenience aspect is trust. It would
do the consumer no good to pay a small amount of money only to be cheated.
The consumer not only wants to save money but also to be treated honestly. The sales psychology in
on-line divorce is therefore primarily based upon both cost and trust - in similar
quantities.
Pricing can
always be misleading. There may be up-selling, cross-selling, a menu of
prices, expensive installment payments, hidden fees, etc., but by and large a
divorce is a divorce and there is not too much deception that can be brought to
bear upon the price of a divorce if the consumer sticks to her guns.
Building trust in an on-line divorce provider is a completely different story.
One does this by providing an honest cost-effective service over an extended
period of time such that one's clients are satisfied and spread the word. For
some, such honesty and hard work just take too long. There are many short cuts
available to the dishonest.
Does the following story constitute fraud by MDP? I will lay out what I found and let the reader
decide. I define criminal fraud as obtaining a substantive advantage or gain by
purposeful deception,
namely by
representing that some substantive fact is true when it is not or vice versa.
In short, you lie for the purpose of tricking people into hiring you.
In July 2013, MDP began to display on the top page of
its website a certified
customer testimonials service called certifiedcomments.com.
This purports to be a service that contacts a subscribing company's customers,
confirms that they were in fact customers of the company in question and obtains
from them comments, presumably mostly positive, about the company's performance.
They provide a potentially valuable service in telling future
potential customers what to expect and what others have experienced - providing
of course that the testimonials are legitimate and unpaid, are from real
customers and that the certification company is independent and transparent.
There are a number of such services around. NetDivorce subscribes to one.
MDP's sister divorce sites, idivorceforms.com and divorceforher.com also began
to display content from certifiedcomments.com. MDP's sister bankruptcy site,
bankruptcypapers.com followed suit, though that domain is obviously outside
the scope of this article.
The registrar of the domain name, certifiedcomments.com is
Wild West Domains.
A WhoIs search there reveals this.
Certifiedcomments.com has a private registration. The name of the person
or company that
owns the domain name is hidden from the public. The person or company paid the registrar
extra for that privacy. There is nothing suspicious about a private registration itself. However, it might seem strange for the type of company
Certified Comments purports to be - one that deals in public trust and
transparency. What could possibly be the reason why the person or company behind the
Certified Comments service pays extra to hide its name?
Of course, it could be mere coincidence that mydivorcepapers.com,
idivorceforms.com and divorceforher.com ALL have Wild West Domains as their
registrar, though none of them have private registrations. They probably want to
build public confidence in their sites and so do not conceal the name of their
owner.
But public confidence must
also be important to a service like certifiedcomments.com.
In fact, certifiedcomments.com refers to public confidence on its remarkably simple 3-page website (top page, login page for
"existing clients" and an email page to request
an "invite"). They say, "Show
your customers that you are real and that each of your testimonials has been
validated by a third party as being 100% real." and "We offer a 100% guarantee that we have exercised best practices to validate the testimonials displayed on your website." And then the
most impressive, "We will not display our seal of approval on any testimonial unless we are confident that it is real and passes our inspection. If we do not, we will pay you $250,000."
Hmmm. "If we do not" do WHAT? Do not not display? Whatever promise they are trying to make, why would they make that promise to the subscribing business, which
presumably provides the name and contact details of the alleged customer providing the
testimonial, and not to a customer
that is duped by the false testimonial? It is the website's future customer that would be
cheated by a false or
fraudulent testimonial by Certified Comments, not the website itself. The website would be complicit in the fraud. Strange.
In any event, certifiedcomments.com must have quite an extensive clientele - given their
dedication to honesty and integrity, not to mention their apparent wealth. Let's take a look at how popular they
are. They must have many corporate clients. Go ahead and search on
"certifiedcomments.com." In Google Search, I found this on the top page of the
search results. Of the 9 top entries, 3 of them are the 3 public pages on the
certifiedcomments site
and 4 of them are the pages for mydivorceforms.com and idivorcepapers.com on the
certifiedcomments site. I went 5 pages deep in the search engine results and
found not one other entry that referenced certifiedcomments.com and any other
client, other than mydivorcepapers.com and idivorceforms.com. It appears
that certifiedcomments.com has only those two subscribing customers (presumably
divorceforher.com and bankruptcypapers.com are somewhere further down the search engine
results). It's just amazing that Jason McClain's two top on-line divorce
sites appear to be the only clients of certifiedcomments.com.
Perhaps, NetDivorce should sign up also, so that MDP won't feel so alone. Perhaps
certifiedcomments.com specializes in divorce sites only.
Wait a minute. There's no street or mailing address or phone number or email
address exposed on certifiedcomments.com. How do their clients or
potential clients contact
them? Oh yeah, through that web mail contact form on their site. So the next
thing I did was to send three requests across a 2 week period. But wait, it does
say I'm requesting an invite. I guess they are so busy and selective
(not to mention wealthy) that
they don't take just any old company. Well, we know that's correct because
so far, they've apparently only invited 2 companies - in fact, they have only invited
Jason McClain's companies. Imagine that.
In any event,
as expected, I heard nothing back from certifiedcomments.com. Somehow, they did not find netdivorce.com worthy of an invite.
After all, ownership by Jason McClain appears to be the primary cause of an
invite.
I still wondered where
certifiedcomments is
located. Maybe I could find them in the yellow pages
or somewhere on-line and give them a call. So I pinged their domain name server and lo and
behold, it's in Irvine, CA. It has a Cox Communications IP address.
Nope. No listing in the Orange County yellow pages. Maybe I'm just going to have
to call Jason and ask him to get certifiedcomments.com to give me a call. He
must have their number - being their only apparent client. Wait another minute! All of
Jason's divorce companies are in the Irvine area.
I don't suppose......no, that would be too much of a coincidence. Let's
take a look at all other domains on the same Cox Communications IP subnet as
certifiedcomments.com. Well. here's that list.
What an incredible set of coincidences. The very same certifiedcomments.com
service that Jason McClain uses to establish public confidence and trust in his
divorce sites and gain an advantage over his competitors like,......oh,
NetDivorce, by representing that MDP, for example, has 1512 certified comments
providing a cumulative rating for MDP of 4.8 out of 5 stars, is hosted on the
very same server as many Jason McClain websites, including the two sites on
which alleged client testimonials are being certified by Certified Comments!
Well, at least Certified Comments didn't give MDP a ranking of 5 stars. Now that would
have appeared real suspicious, huh?
1512 certified comments for MDP in just over 15 months. Hmmm. That's 100
per month or 3 a day. That's phenomenal! What a company MDF must be.
If you figure out the url pagination on certifiedcomments.com, it's easy enough
to navigate to
http://www.certifiedcomments.com/review/mydivorcepapers.php?view=209#pagination
where you will see that the oldest certified comment about MDP is dated June 7,
2012 and is from someone in Bethesda, Maryland. Uuuuh? But the certifiedcomments domain
name was only registered for the
very first time on July 3 2013. So it looks like certifiedcomments.com was
validating customer testimonials for MDP over a year before it even came into
existence. Certifiedcomments.com is so good, I sure wish NetDivorce had
been invited to join. We'd have requested some 10 year old certified
comments, which I'm confident they would have had.
Fraud is the obtaining of some advantage
or gain by intentionally representing that a
substantive fact is true when it is not and you know, or should know, that it is
not. If you obtain business, i.e. gain, by the intentional representation
that you have earned over 1500 legitimate client testimonials, as verified and certified by
an independent certification company in the business of performing such
functions, when you know that said representation is false, or should have known
it is false (it is not a defense to criminal fraud to claim that you were
ignorant when such ignorance would be reckless - you cannot purposefully hold
yourself in ignorance of what appears on a website for which you are
responsible), then you are guilty of criminal fraud.
Do the facts detailed above constitute fraud by Jason McClain and/or one or more
of his associates? I cannot say, because I cannot get into the minds of
such people. These facts certainly, in my opinion, amount to a prima facie case
of criminal fraud. I can say with some certainty that deception is occuring and
that there is a consequent gain.
However, I cannot speak to intent. Perhaps Jason McCalin will say that he
always intended to set up a legitimate certifiedcomments.com company and just
never got around to it. It's not a bad business idea and he is clearly an
enterprising person. However, that claim cannot be a defense to fraud because at
some point in that scenario, he inherently admits to knowing that such had not
happened and that he was in fact, from that point in time, making false
statements for the obvious and undeniable purpose of obtaining an unfair
advantage over others.
Perhaps Jason McClain will say that he actually has
over 1500 legitimate testimonials accumulated across some 27 (not 15) months,
but that's not a defense either because his substantive claim on his website is
NOT simply that 1500 testimonials exist, but that those testimonials were certified by an independent company, when it seems they were
not.
I suspect that Jason will claim that certifiedcomments.com is in fact an independent
company, owned by a friend, neighbor or an associate and that he has no control over it. That story won't work either as he, Jason McClain, is responsible for
the statements on his website and he would know, under those circumstances, that
Certified Comments would not be functionally independent in the sense he is representing. Why would a truly independent and functioning Certified Comments have a private domain registration,
two apparent clients, hide its points of contact and permit its website to be on the same server grouping as its only 2 clients? Such would merely give rise to a
conspiracy to defraud.
I noticed also that around October, 2014, MDP began to display an eKomi verification
badge as well as that of Certified Comments. Jason had somehow convinced
eKomi, a legitimate and real testimonial verrification company, to accept his
"existing" testimonials, as verified by Certified Comments. I suspect that
within a few months, after Jason had laundered those 1500 allleged testimonials
through eKomi, he would have quietly dropped the bogus Certified Comments
service. Yet in December 2014, eKomi clearly did their homework,
discovered the alleged fraud, and dropped Jason and MDP.
As I said above, we in the on-line divorce industry are substantially unregulated.
That has some legitimate advantages, not the least of which is cost-reduction.
We in the industry ought to self-regulate in order to avoid costly government
regulation as long as possible. It would help us if we didn't have low-level
questionable business practices like this, but we do. This article, like
my earlier articles, is an attempt
to self-regulate.
Don't be fooled by Jason McClain, mydivorcepapers.com or idivorceforms.com.
They do NOT have 1500 independently verified client testimonials. You can draw your own
conclusions as to where those 1500 "testimonials" likely came from.
Wherever they came from, they are not verified. Therefore, they are as valuable
as if Jason's mom or staff wrote them.
While I hope that this has been entertaining, please do realize that it is the unsuspecting divorce consumer who is the target of any deception.
Before hiring mydivorcepapers.com or idivorceforms.com, any divorce consumer should ask herself
why those 2 sites would use an apparently non-existent testimonial verification
service to convince you that they have received an average of 3 verified
testimonials per day across the last 2 years IF they are honest divorce
preparation sites that provide a quality service?
Stay tuned for my next article on fraud in the on-line divorce industry.
It is about....Jason McClain and mydivorcepapers.com - the gift that just keeps
on giving.
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