UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh has documented instances of fraudulent anti-libel takedown injunctions in a Utah Law Review article titled *Shenanigans (Internet Takedown Edition)*. 2021 ULR 237. Download from Professor Volokh UCLA
- Here’s a copy of the 2017 sanctions order against Richart Ruddie issued by the United States District Court in Rhode Island.Download USCOURTS-rid-1_16-cv-00144-1 Richart Ruddie Fraud Sanctions Order Rhode Island
In January 2018, AnnuitySold, and related structured settlement factoring companies, associated with Richart Ruddie (now also known as Richart Ruddie Annuity) and Ryan Blank were later banned from doing business in Maryland for 7 years for other frauds soliciting people receiving with structured settlement payments.
- Excerpt: “The Rhode Island litigation also uncovered who was responsible: Richart Ruddie, owner of the reputation management companies SEO Profile Defender Network LLC— which had promised “guaranteed removal” (no payment if the removal does not happen) to its customers—and RIR1984 LLC. Ruddie ultimately settled the case in exchange for $71,000, chiefly consisting of Myvesta’s legal fees (a good measure of how much it would have cost Google to challenge the injunction, had it had a legal obligation to comply with it). Ruddie also agreed to ask Florida and Maryland courts to vacate three other court orders that called for the de indexing of Myvesta posts related to Smith’s companies, Smith v. Levin, Financial Rescue LLC v. Smith, and Rescue One Financial LLC v. Doe. In Smith v. Levin, court records included Levin’s ostensible address (the common practice in Maryland); no-one with that name could be found at that address. Professor Volokh confirmed through independent sources that some of the other cases that fit the same modus operandi were likewise filed through Richart Ruddie. The pattern in all these cases appears to have been the same:
1.The company filed a libel lawsuit in the plaintiff’s name against a fake defendant, seeking an injunction
- Forgeries
- Stipulated Injunctions Involving Apparently Fake Defendants
- Stipulated Injunctions Involving Fake Notarization
- Default Judgments Obtained Without Genuine Attempts to Locate Defendants
- Wag the Dog Injunctions, Sue the Commenter, not the Author
- Buried URL injunction
Note: Originally published by this author in February 2020. We believe our original work was plagiarized and published on another site that has no other articles on the same subject as part of a scheme similar to what is described in this article. in March 2021 a brazen DMCA takedown was attempted to attempt to suppress our voice which we contested. This post and another post, a 2015 post (having to do with a lawsuit against Richart Ruddie and others that the cocksure Ruddie once bragged about to sell his reputation management services). In addition, we discovered 50 other posts of ours published between November 2012 and 2016, that were plagiarized, all of which had to do with reported matters concerning Richart Ruddie, Richart Ruddie Annuity, Einstein Structured Settlements, AnnuitySold and/or his associates.
One would think that someone with a reputation management company, like Richart Ruddie Annuity, would simply not have engaged in the conduct cited so many times by Professor Volokh, deemed by Professor Volokh to worthy enough to be cited in a Law Review article (and previously splashed across the pages of the Washington Post that is public record to begin with). That being said, there may have been a risk/reward or risk/loss assessment that was made before engaging in the conduct cited by Professor Volokh.
Updated October 19, 2021