If It Leads, It Bleeds - Lead Generation, Crowdstrike, Kars4Kids, and Food Lawsuits
Lead Generation
Last week, some of you may have noticed an article in Sherwood about The End of Spam (I did not choose the headline.) This was my first piece of professional journalism, and I am grateful to the folks at Sherwood Media who helped make it happen.
Despite my personal history working in lead generation, reporting this piece exposed me to a universe of data rustlers I’d been only tangentially familiar with. My previous job was at a small lead generation company, and we sold data upstream to larger brokers, some of whom were featured in the piece. In my bubble, running paid ads on Facebook and Google, I did not realize the extent to which the same companies that bought my leads were also buying reams of bad/fake data from less reputable brokers.
Nor were these companies doing much to disguise that fact. The most cartoonish villain in my piece, Fluent, settled with the FTC and agreed to not use any of the billions of leads it had bought and sold over the preceding years, because it couldn’t prove consent (that the customer had opted in to receive marketing communications.) The company was ‘generating’ more than three hundred million leads a year, most of which it effectively admitted were fraudulent. Fluent - still in business! - lists some of the biggest brands in the country on its site as clients. The company’s stock is currently wallowing in the single digits, but at its peak in 2019 it was worth half a billion dollars, selling a mix of real and fake leads, resulting in staggering amounts of unwanted marketing spam.
Even with the FCC’s new rules kicking in next year to make companies like Fluent liable for selling bad leads, I am hardly optimistic we will see wholesale change in the lead generation industry, or an major decline in the flood of robocalls and texts we continue to receive. Despite my editor’s optimism, I don’t believe this guidance will bring about the end of spam.
The thing that could bring it about would be a national privacy law. The US is the only wealthy country without one, and that fact will be abused by the wealthy and powerful until we stop them. Just this week we learned that Elon Musk’s PAC has been collecting personal data on voters in swing states, under the premise of voter registration.
Musk’s operatives have been spending his money advertising voter registration on Facebook and Google, directing swing state voters to a form that collects their data, presumably for retargeting or candidate solicitations. It is unclear whether this is illegal, though state AGs may have the ability to put a stop to it. But it underscores the dangers of a lack of federal privacy laws - election subversion via shady leadgen can be as easy as finding someone with money to burn.
This is not a new problem - in 2018, when I was working on GOTV efforts in Florida, I noticed a site called DMV.org was the top search result for ‘voter registration’ in many states, often organically and not via paid ads. As the site now clearly displays, it is not a government-affiliated website, and was in fact a clever SEO play from a company in San Diego. For years, it collected data from unwitting people trying to register to vote. After I surfaced the issue to a journalist friend, Google eventually delisted the site a year later. The same Google that is happily accepting Musk’s money to advertise his fake election site at the top of search results.
All this is to say - lead generation is, at best, the reason our phones and inboxes are full of scams and spam. At worst, it’s working to subvert elections and democracy. Either way, it’s critical the government does more to protect our privacy, and leadgen is the perfect place to start.
Crowdstrike
On July 19, a company few people outside of IT knew existed caused millions of Windows servers around the world to crash. Basically, the company pushed an update to the core ‘kernel’ processes of Windows servers, and because its software was granted high-level admin access, it broke everything. Servers were stuck in ‘blue screen of death’ (BSOD) loops, and early on the best suggestion anyone had was ‘reboot the machines fifteen times’ which is, you know, not great.
We’ve talked about the dangers of having critical systems too centralized, too overly concentrated on a single platform, and boy has Crowdstrike provided a handy playbook on what Not To Do. Tech writers have compared the outage to the original Y2K panic, which turned out to be overblown. In contrast, estimates of billions in losses may be underblown in this case, because the millions of systems running largely unnoticed at companies across the world could take weeks or months to be fixed, since a patch can’t simply be pushed across the Internet. Those servers sitting in dusty closets need a human reset to receive critical updates. Our hearts go out to all the datacenter workers who’ve had a rough few weeks.
It is wild to think that a multi-billion dollar company whose entire purpose is to protect systems from intrusion and failure ended up becoming the cause of both, wreaking more havoc than any hacker ever could.
The company has released a tech-heavy statement to explain what happened, but the bottom line is that it did not have sufficient checks and balances in its software rollout processes, and the people in charge at every level goofed, badly.
I like to say that the problem with any software system is its authors - anything created by humans (or AI, which is just plagiarizing code from other humans) can be deconstructed or hacked by other humans. Sometimes, those humans may even work at the same company.
Kars4Kids
Two weeks ago, we discussed the harrowing story of a family of deadbeat landlords who bought up distressed and subsidized apartment buildings, siphoning off rent payments and allowing them to collapse into disrepair and foreclosure.
While researching that story I ran across a piece from more than a decade ago that took a surprising turn:
Oorah also aimed to raise money by investing in real estate development. It’s not clear when the group began investing with developers, though auditor reports note investments going back to 2008. Reports filed with the Office of the New York State Attorney General do not specify the names of the developers involved or the specific locations of the projects, but by comparing descriptions with press accounts, it appears that at least two of the investments were made with a developer named Leib Puretz.
Oorah is the business arm of Kars4Kids, an Orthodox Jewish charity run out of South Jersey that creates some of the most obnoxious television ads ever aired. They are so bad I won’t even link one here to spare you the accidental click. Reddit sums it up nicely:
It turns out, K4K and Oorah spent a large chunk of the money they raised through the charity on…speculative real estate investments in the tri-state area! Including the ill-fated Staten Island outlet mall that precipitated Lieb Puretz’s bankruptcy in 2011.
Like Puretz, Oorah funneled money from its charity operations into high-rise apartment complexes that tended to end up in foreclosure. Unlike Puretz, whose family also used non-profits and charities to evade taxes, Oorah is still operating and fundraising with the express purpose of doing charitable acts, then taking large portions of the funds to invest in shady real estate deals.
Nor does much of the actual charitable spending help kids outside small Orthodox Jewish communities close to the org’s founders. A 2017 Minnesota AG’s report found that less than one percent of money raised by K4K was spent on kids within the state, where the charity advertised:
According to [AG Lori] Swanson, however, only about 44 percent of the $88 million it raised nationally from 160,000 donated vehicles between 2012 and 2014 went to good works.
[…]
During that time, only one Minnesota child was thought to have benefited from an Oorah program.
Despite running ads in all fifty states, K4K and Oorah spend lavishly on ‘promoting Orthodox Judiasm’ in New York and New Jersey, mostly in the form of summer camps for members of the community.
This year, a class action lawsuit was filed against K4K, alleging that the charity’s advertising says its donations help local children regardless of religion, while doing the opposite. It also cites the significant capital outflows to Oorah, which spends its millions as it sees fit, with a strong preference for slumlording.
If that damn jingle wasn’t enough of a crime against humanity, it turns out the people behind it are much, much worse.
Food Lawsuits
It has been too long since we’ve talked about food lawsuits around here. First, we’ve got a Ohio Supreme Court ruling on the definition (or lack thereof) of boneless wings:
In a 4-3 ruling, the Supreme Court said Thursday that “boneless wings” refers to a cooking style, and that Berkheimer should’ve been on guard against bones since it’s common knowledge that chickens have bones.
I mean, I guess? The case in question involved a man suing a restaurant over finding a bone in his boneless wings. Which seems a little spurious, until you hear what happened to him:
Three days later, feverish and unable to keep food down, Berkeimer went to the emergency room, where a doctor discovered a long, thin bone that had torn his esophagus and caused an infection.
Yikes. Though I often come down on the side of defendants for comedy reasons if naught else, it is probably not the restaurant’s fault this guy got a piece of chicken lodged in his throat and waited three days to go to the emergency room.
Elsewhere, a higher stakes case is playing out in federal court. The guy who did not invent Flamin’ Hot Cheetos is suing Pepsi for (eventually) admitting that fact:
A former PepsiCo executive is suing the company, saying it destroyed his career after questioning his claim that he invented the popular flavor of Cheetos snacks.
We talked about this a few years ago and the evidence is pretty clear that Richard Montañez did not invent the snack, and was actually ripping off the work of a female product manager at Frito Lay who created what became the Flamin’ Hot line of products.
The weird bit in the original LA Times exposé that appears to have fueled the lawsuit is that, for many years, Frito Lay did allow Montañez to write books and give speeches saying he was its inventor. They even cooperated with a movie based on the lie that came out last year. Only when contacted by journalists after the release of his 2021 memoir did the company walk back its story.
So, even though Montañez did not invent the Cheeto in question, does the company owe him some sort of compensation for damaging his career? I want to say no? But I wouldn’t be surprised if they gave him some money to go away.
Short Cons
404 Media - ““The post you are seeing now is of a poor man that is being used to generate revenue,” he says in Hindi, pointing with his pen to an image of a skeletal elderly man hunched over being eaten by hundreds of bugs.”
WaPo - “As a newly minted senator, Vance solicited Johnson’s views on many topics, including UFOs (“What is your read”), the Republican Party’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (“What is GOP Bibi problem?”) and the death of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (“Do you think Epstein actually killed himself?”).”
WaPo - “Many school buildings have aging infrastructure that is more likely to leach lead into the water. And children are the most vulnerable to the harmful effects of lead poisoning. But despite an increased awareness of the danger posed by lead in water, there is no national mandate that requires testing drinking water in schools and child-care facilities.”
ProPublica - “Over the ensuing years, Murphy transferred between $80,000 and $100,000 annually from Chorost’s accounts to Beacon while, separately, she collected tens of thousands of dollars from him in guardianship fees.”
Toms Guide - “The personal data of 2.9 billion people, which includes full names, former and complete addresses going back 30 years, Social Security Numbers, and more, was stolen from National Public Data by a cybercriminal group that goes by the name USDoD.”
ABC News - “Prosecutors in special counsel David Weiss' office are accusing Hunter Biden of accepting payments from a Romanian businessman who was attempting to "influence U.S. government agencies," while his father Joe Biden was vice president.”
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