The war

One curious phone call turned into a reverse-IP search, and the reverse-IP search turned into a number I did not believe the first time I saw it.

Around 50,000 template websites. Same stamp, same skeleton, all traced back to one operation.

The model was robocalls. Somebody rings your shop, says they are calling about your Google listing, tells you it is at risk, and sells you a monthly bill for a website you never asked for and cannot find. The people picking up those calls were plumbers, florists, contractors, two-person shops running on nothing.

So I went after all of them, by hand, for a year. Phone and email, one owner at a time, explaining what they were actually paying for and how to get out. About 20,000 businesses cancelled their contracts.

Then the agency's lawyers arrived, and I learned what the legal system is actually for.

They sued me for $20M to $30M. I was twenty-five and did not have twenty-five thousand. They put a levy on my parents' house — that is the number I actually think about, and it is not a number at all.

Police pulled me out of bed one morning. I spent a day in a cell.

I could not afford a lawyer, so I became the worst one in Pennsylvania. I taught myself filings in the courthouse law library, sitting with the statute books like a kid cramming for finals. Bill Cosby was on trial in that same building that year, so I would walk past the news trucks on my way in to read about procedure.

I built the case. Every site, every recording, every owner who would put their name to it. And the judge read it and said this to me. Son, I believe everything you wrote in here. But you didn't submit it correctly, so I can't consider it.

Read that again. Not you are wrong. Not prove it. Believed, and inadmissible.

I took it to the FTC. I took it to the FBI. I took it to the Attorney General. Every one of them agreed with me and not one of them moved.

That is the year I stopped believing that being right is a strategy. Being right is a starting position. Being right with money and lawyers behind you is a strategy, and everybody getting robbed on those phone calls had neither.