Crypto critic Molly White received emails from a purported lawyer and someone working for a “reputation management company” offering bribes in exchange for the takedown of a blog post about the arrest of an alleged crypto fraudster.
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In August, the crypto news website Web3 Is Going Just Great published a post about the arrest of Roman Ziemian, the founder of crypto trading platform FutureNet, which is alleged to have defrauded victims out of a combined $21 million.
For the news site’s administrator, Molly White, a software engineer and one of the world’s fiercest critics of the crypto industry, that was a routine post. For years, White has documented frauds, hacks, and scams perpetrated by influences, crypto project founders, and web3 companies on the website.
Then, last week, things got a bit less routine.
On October 18, a person who did not identify themselves but claimed to run a “reputation management company” that cleans up “clients image over the internet,” asked White to remove her X post about FutureNet and Ziemian, “which is about my client.”
The person then offered White a bribe of $200 to remove the corresponding post from Web3 Is Going Just Great, according to a copy of the exchange that White shared with TechCrunch.
White declined the offer, arguing that there were no errors in her posts. The unnamed person agreed, according to the response seen by TechCrunch, but nevertheless upped the price to $500.
White told TechCrunch that this “isn’t the first time someone has tried to intimidate me into removing my factual reporting, and it won’t be the first time they succeed,” but, White added, it was the first time someone offered her money to do it.
The unnamed person did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
A few days later, someone identifying as a lawyer named Michael Woods emailed White. Citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which governs U.S. copyright law, Woods alleged that White’s post infringed copyright because, they claimed, “this page content has been copied from our website,” according to the email exchange that White also shared with TechCrunch.
Woods included a link to a Blogspot website called “WP Media News” that shows the exact word-for-word content from White’s post, allegedly from August 18, 2024, a day before White’s post and purportedly written by Woods themselves.
At first glance, the Blogspot site appears to be some sort of a content farm filled with dozens of articles about various types of news, such as crypto fraud, sanctions against Russians, and COVID-19, going all the way back to 1995, and all authored by Woods. (TechCrunch found that the site was in part run on Rankify, a service that offers to generate “SEO optimized human-like content” using AI.)
White told the purported lawyer that, “there are penalties for filing false DMCA claims.” Woods responded by offering White $100 to “permanently remove” the same blog post about Ziemian.
White declined the offer.
TechCrunch was unable to ascertain if Woods is a real individual. The address Woods included in their email signature does not appear to exist in the real-world, as checked by TechCrunch. Woods listed an address in Los Angeles that appears to be a completely empty lot. And, there is no Michael Woods registered as a lawyer in Los Angeles, according to the California State Bar website.
Woods did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment sent via email and in a voicemail.
TechCrunch sent a request for comment to an email address used to register the FutureNet official website, but did not receive a response.
White told TechCrunch: “While I’m always happy to issue corrections if I have made an error, I do not remove posts simply because the people and companies I write about don’t like what I have to say.”
“If I did that, I suspect there wouldn’t be much left on my website,” said White.
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