Shawn Hogan, the operator of the DigitalPoint forums, tools & services has used his SEO knowledge and tactics to construct a site that operates solely as a reflexive act of antagonism against a law firm that unlawfully sued him (without his knowledge) and took $7,000 from a bank account of his.The law firm, Winn & Sims, appears to be the worst kind of legal institution - one whose corruption extends far into the reaches of bad business & financial ethics. I wish Shawn well on his endeavor, he has certainly contributed a great amount to the community - but, nothing, perhaps, is more interesting than his initiation of this virtual guerilla warfare tactic against a company by way of the Internet. The web has truly taken away the consolidation of power that was once held by firms like Winn & Sims and placed it into the hands of the people they influence.
I have heard of other cases similiar to this... For example, a search for Lincoln Towing of Seattle reveals a very unhappy client who is airing her dirty laundry publicly. Lincoln Towing can't be happy about their rankings either, which as of the current time are squarely ahead of any of the company's own sites. I'm not even sure she was attempting to out-rank them, but on the web... these things can happen. The rule here is, don't upset the bloggers, they have "eery powers".
Funny they brought it here and not my site, but okay... some content for ya randfish. heh
As far as being "unlawfully sued", that may not have been *legally* accurate, but "shadily sued" is without argument.
Winn and Sims did hire an attorney service to serve a summons, so that clears them of the liability of actually delivering the summons. But I certainly would question if they truly believed a summons (which required a 216 mile round trip) was going to be served for the price of $22 (what they paid).
Based on that, I would say they are either shady (if they knew it would never actually be served) or just stupid/ignorant (if they thought it WOULD be served).
https://www.winn-and-sims.com/2004/09/why-i-wasnt-served-summons.html
Jonathan - I believe your colors are showing through (IP address - 66.167.7.57).
I have no reason to defend myself; one must first be attacked in order to defend. I simply find it amusing and engaging that you and Caw (clearly both representatives of the firm in question) continue to pursue this matter with vigor, when your very comments serve to increase the visibility of this page and the liklihood that it will continue to rank well for terms you'd prefer to keep buried.
A wise move would be to let this conversation and conflict fade into the background.
Caw - I must say it is you, sir, who have great gall in posting here. First off, it allows us to track your IP address - 65.184.234.103 for anyone who needs to know.
It is also clear that your affiliation lies with the injuring party - the law firm Winn and Sims. I would strongly recommend that you and your colleagues seek better methods to conduct business. Openness, honesty and ethics are highly valued in the web community.
I have edited your post to remove specifics, but have not removed the post entirely as I feel your continued negativity is newsworthy.
Bravo! on your success in continuing to cast Winn and Simms in an increasingly negative light.
Mike - Tried to edit your comment to clean up the link and ended up messing it up and losing the original (hate that).
In any case, that is a complete misrepresentation of what I've written about above. Those guys are real miscreants to take quotes like that out of context, without linking back - dirty, dirty, dirty...
I was illegally served by Winn and Sims, paid a company over 100 miles away to serve me but they never did. The service said "John Doe" room mate. I don't have a male room mate. I didn't know about the summons and Winn and Sims got a $14,000.00 judgment against me. This was for a contract as a co-signor which I never signed. The declaration from F&A Federal Credit Union (the ones that hired Winn&Sims) said that they dont have a contract that it was either misplaced, destroyed or lost. NO...thats because I never signed one. This law firm and the credit union are crooked and need to have a class action suit against them and a complaint made to the California Bar. Lets give them back what they did to us!
Add the fact below to their long list of crookedness!https://www.angelfire.com/droid/sinnwims/winnsims.pdf
PDF file has copies of the letter and the fake money orders.Winn & Sims law firm tried to get me to endorse fake US Postal money orders to pay off a debt I'm not personally responsible for.I turned the fake money orders over to the postmaster at the Spurgeon Post Office in Santa Ana, California.My theory is they tried to trick me into committing fraud in an attempt to blackmail me into paying a debt I personally dont owe.This law firm has a history of crookedness.
What gets me the most is the comments they have made over here.
Judging from your response to CAW it appears that your only defense to his comments is to go on the offensive. Your link to the personal blog site above is misleading - but you have no comment on that.
You say that Winn and Sims "unlawfully sued him". How is that? They hired an attorney service. The attorney service gave them a proof of service which they filed with the court. There is nothing unlawful about that. This was a case of stolen identity and was settled and all of Hogan's money was returned to him.
Shawn Hogan has renewed his domain registration to winn-and-sims.com for another two years. As part of the settlement he agreed not to use winnandsims.com, so he registered winn-and-sims.com instead. Guess the settlement wasn't enough for him...
You have some nerve talking about Winn and Sims, when your link to "Winn and Sims" above actually links to Shawn Hogan's personal blog site winn-and-sims.com. You are deceptively making it look like a link to the official Winn and Sims site ---edited---!
In case you didn't know, Shawn Hogan's company Digital Point Solutions owns the domain name winn-and-sims.com, as well as the two sites he links to on his blog under the category "Stuff". "---edited---" links to ---edited---, and "---edited---" links to ---edited---. These sites are obviously linked there to inflate search engine rankings. Fortunately these dirty SEO tactics only appear to work with MSN Search, and not Google or Yahoo!
Oh, and Digital Point Solutions also provides hosting for ---edited--- (another questionable site) and ---edited---'s ---edited---. ---edited--- (alias ---edited---) is one of the blog's most ardent supporters (no surprise there!)