A man identifying himself as "Jim Rickson" has demanded that I shut down the website. He threatened that if I did not do as he demanded, he would retaliate. This blog will document what he has done, who he is, and what doctor he appears to be working for.

Disclaimer: I cannot prove any of this... yet, so for now it is an educated guess.

My educated guess

I suspect that Dr. William A. Boothe, an eye surgeon in Plano, Texas specializing in LASIK has employed the services of "Jim Rickson" to do whatever he can to delete comments posted at DoctorScorecard. If not Dr. Boothe himself, then someone very close to him has employed the services of spammers.

Here is a sample comment an anonymous patient posted about Dr. Boothe:

Now I can't see near or far....everything is blurry and I can read up close ONE WORD AT A TIME....don't ask me to read a sentence or a street sign.

the office tried to rush me into doing the second eye before the first healed...Then I would be almost blind in both eyes and unable to work

DO NOT TRUST THIS MAN

What was the threat?

Yesterday, on May 19, "Jim Rickson" called my home phone number. My wife answered and told him I couldn't take his call and hung up. He called back... repeatedly. I finally picked up the phone. He asked me if I was "Earl". I didn't answer his question, but instead asked him "Who is this?" He said something like "I specialize in defamation on the internet, removing it... and adding it." I asked him, "So you engage in illegal activity?" I asked him again, "Who are you? What business are you with?" He answered "Jim Rickson", but did not name his company. After I got him to spell out his name, I hung up the phone.

He continued calling our home repeatedly (from his number of 310-697-8303) and left a message on our answering machine saying "Earl, I'm not going away."

My wife promptly changed our home phone number. The calls stopped.

The email

Last night I received the following email:

The email continues to spew lie after lie. Doing an easy search online revealed that he simply copied and pasted the disturbing write-up from another website. He obviously changed the name of the accused to my name.

Defamation posted online

Within hours of the email, many pages appeared online with the repulsive comments, mostly regarding sexually immoral acts, designed to hurt me personally. Ironically, I would never tolerate this kind of abuse to a doctor on this site. If a doctor feels that someone has lied about them, there are simple guidelines, which include just sending us a simple email. We treat doctors with respect and want to protect them from libel and defamation. We have deleted libelous comments from this site.

This spammer never asked us to delete or edit comments from any specific doctor. Why? I think because Dr. Boothe has paid him to carry out these activities and Dr. Boothe does not want to be easily detected... since it's illegal. It's illegal because it is obviously defamation, libel, harassment, and now property damage.

Today, a team of spammers defaced the website. The attacks came from Romania, Vietnam, China, Mexico, Turkey, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and USA (Keene, New Hampshire). Fortunately, we have safe guards in place for exactly such an attack so all of the spam has been removed from the site. However, I fully expect them to keep trying. So for short periods of time you might see some spam get through on the site until we get it corrected. We would appreciate your help... tell us if you see something unusual on the site and we will investigate.

Who made the threat?

On May 9, 2008, an email was sent by Dave Boothe (davidboothe@gmail.com)

I noticed on your website that we could send an email if we were not happy with comments posted about our doctor on your website.

there are a several comments that completely not true and are very hurtful to Dr. Boothe's reputation. Some of the comments are not even from patients. Is it possible to have our profile completely removed? We would prefer if Dr. Boothe was not listed on your website at all.

Feel free to email me or call our office at 214-328-0444 (ask for David Boothe) to discuss options reguarding the comments on your website.

thank you very much

-David Boothe

I did not reply or call David Boothe.

On May 10, 2008, an email was sent by Texeyecare@aol.com (Texeyecare@aol.com):

Subject: re: dr boothe

I noticed that you have slanderous material about me in your website. One entry indicates that they are not even a patient. My recommendation would be that you remove my name from the site. I spent a million dollars getting a site removed over three years ago. Therefore you have to know that I have a lot of resolve to protect my reputation. I will start with the easy steps first and go from there. I would appreciate some correspondence in short order or I will proceed to the next step.

I didn't respond to the email. I felt his email was threatening and he did not state how the comments about him were slanderous. If he could have stated how the comments about him were slanderous, the comments would have been removed.

Identity of caller

As stated earlier, the next communication was from many phone calls on May-19-2008 from a man identifying himself as:

"Jim Rickson"

Doing some searching online reveals that this is an alias used by a major spammer.

Court records show that this man was taken to court by ripoffreport.com

Text from image:

WILLIAM “BILL” STANLEY, an
individual; WILLIAM “BILL” STANLEY
d/b/a DEFAMATION ACTION.COM;
WILLIAM “BILL” STANLEY d/b/a
COMPLAINTREMOVER.COM; WILLIAM
“BILL” STANLEY aka JIM RICKSON;
WILLIAM “BILL” STANLEY aka MATT
JOHNSON; ROBERT RUSSO, an
individual; ROBERT RUSSO d/b/a
COMPLAINTREMOVER.COM; ROBERT
RUSSO d/b/a DEFENDMYNAME.COM;
ROBERT RUSSO d/b/a QED MEDIA
GROUP, L.L.C.; QED MEDIA GROUP,
L.L.C.; QED MEDIA GROUP, L.L.C. d/b/a
DEFENDMYNAME.COM; QED MEDIA
GROUP, L.L.C. d/b/a
COMPLAINTREMOVER.COM;
DEFAMATION ACTION LEAGUE, an
unincorporated association; and INTERNET
DEFAMATION LEAGUE, an
unincorporated association

• Jim Rickson is clearly an alias for Bill Stanley.
• Bill Stanley appears to be the spammer's real name.

According to SpamHaus.org, Bill Stanley has ties to Romania and Austria. The email he sent with the alias "Matt Henley" was sent from IP 80.96.120.30 (stud.usv.ro), which is in Romania.

On ZDNetAsia, Matt Henley is shown to work for eBay in their anti-fraud department. The real Matt Henley was quoted as saying:

A huge percentage of the fraud we were seeing was from Romania.

His efforts helped get hundreds of arrests in Romania. Bill Stanley, the spammer with ties to Romania, is probably continuing his abuse by claiming to be Matt Henley, the eBay employee. Bill Stanley must hate Matt Henly for getting many Romanian spammers arrested. By using "Matt Henly" as an alias, he his trying to defame his character as well.

William Stanley / Ironserver.com is listed as one of the world's top 200 spammers.

Why I believe Dr. Boothe is employing this spammer

1. Negative comments he doesn't want you to see... If you do a Google search for Dr. William A Boothe on Google, DoctorScorecard is shown as the #2 website, preceded only by Dr. Boothe's main business website.

   

   Unfortunately for Dr. Boothe, some patients wrote some negative comments about his business. Dr. Boothe doesn't want people to see what is at DoctorScorecard.
   



2. Dr. Boothe's email... An email from Dr. Boothe's email address was sent just days before the spammer called. The email from Dr. Boothe threatened that he would "proceed to the next step". Getting the spammer to attack must be the "next step" he was referring to.



3. Dr. Boothe is shown favorably on many websites registered by Bill Stanley. There are many sites created on the internet for Dr. William A Boothe by Bill Stanley.

   SpamHaus.org has a huge collection of data on this spammer. Spamhaus lists just about everything you would want to know about Bill Stanley. (Link might be tricky to open... open once. Answer Yes. If that doesn't work, close the browser and open the link again. Then the site should show you everything.)

   

   Description: Non-stop spammer and spam host, sells "bullet-proof hosting" to other spammers to host spam websites. Stanley is an American from Texas.

   From Texas? That's where Dr. Boothe is located as well.

   He claims to operate "offshore" in Austria and has connections with Austria and Romania.

   Stanley works with other criminal method spammers to set up "off-shore" hosting, mostly in Romania.

   Yep, we have received a lot of spam on our site today from Romania.

   He is constantly searching for fresh hosting and continuously sets up accounts with Internet providers in Austria, Romania and the US. He normally either uses the account to host his 'Ironserver' spam service on, or sometimes gets (BGP) routing for his own (RIPE-allocated) IPs on which he then hosts spam service sites.

   He is constantly being terminated by hosts. Each time he is terminated he leaves without paying his hosting bills.

   Stanley claims he is not traceable by the authorities.

   Here is a small sample of the many sites that Bill Stanley, the spammer, has registered:

   drwilliamboothelasik.com
   aboutdrwilliamboothe.com
   allaboutdrboothe.com
   BOOTHE-LASIK.COM

   According to SpamHaus, here are more domains either owned by or being promoted by Stanley's spam gang:

   bootheeyecare.com
   boothelasercenter.com
   boothelasikcenter.com
   BOOTHELASIKDIRECTORY.COM
   BOOTHELASIKEYECARE.COM
   BOOTHELASIKINFO.COM
   BOOTHELASIKNEWS.COM
   LASIKBOOTHE.COM
   LASIKDALLASBOOTHE.COM

   My favorite site is:
   
   drwilliambootheblog.com

   

   In that lengthy blog about "Dr. William Boothe", there are numerous inconsistencies...

   Dr. Willam Boothe was born in the German town of Sweath, Germany on March 16, 1924.

   Dr. William Boothe was born in Quebec, Ontario, Canada, on March 28, 1938.

   Dr. William Boothe was born in Smyrna, Georgia, in 1950.

   Dr. William Boothe (1950-2007), born in San Diego, California, came from a family of modest income.

   Dr. William Boothe was born in the village of Cairo, near Egypt, in 1899. After spending his youth in his native Africa, which was at the time part of the African tribe Chowart.

   LOL! If he were born in 1899, Dr. Boothe is over 100 years old!?

   
   

   
   [ Edit on May-26-2008: last time I checked, someone logged into Boothe's Youtube account and banned this site from showing the video. Here's the direct link to the video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=XRyTOSqs_YU ]

Why would Dr. Boothe want all of these sites with his name in it?

Answer: To manipulate search engines (like Google) to not pay attention to the valid sites where there are negative comments about him. Drown the real websites out with a bunch of crap. Unfortunately for Dr. Boothe, some search engines are not so easily fooled, at least in the case of Google.

Hmmm, since all the facts about Dr. Boothe are messed up so badly, how can we know he is associated with all these spam sites?

We know that Bill Stanley, the spammer, registered the sites for him, according to SpamHaus.org.

On the blog for Dr. Boothe, there are a bunch of links on the top of the page going to digitalreachinc.com.

Where is Digital Reach?




Digital Reach and Dr. William A Boothe are both located in Plano, Texas. The blog is about Dr. Boothe. The blog links to a business in Dr. Boothe's city. The blog was registered by Bill Stanley. It appears Dr. Boothe hired Bill Stanley to make spam sites on his behalf.

How is David Boothe related to Dr. William Boothe? How is Digital Reach related to the Boothes? Tell us if you know.

Now, spam is getting posted on DoctorScorecard by Bill Stanley. They are defacing the pages of other doctors on this site. Fortunately, the spam is getting deleted as fast as it's being placed on the site. But the spammers are committing a crime when they enter libel and post defamation about other doctors.

What are we doing?

The site will remain online. We stand up for you to protect your right to speak freely about your experiences.

We will contact the FBI. One reason for making this blog so detailed is to share it with them.

What can you do?

If you notice spam on the site, please tell us.

If you are a lawyer or would like to help investigate this case, please contact us.

Donations could help cover court costs and investigations to prosecute the spammers and Dr. Boothe if we have enough evidence against him. You could support us by becoming an advertising sponsor for your business or website, as long as it fits well with this site. If you would like to donate, you would help us keep this site up and running.

Also, please tell us if you have or find additional information that could help in our investigation.

Conclusion

This is the first doctor to resort to these unethical tactics. Most doctors are good and this one lone doctor does not represent the majority.

Dr. Boothe: When you read this, I suggest you contact Bill Stanley, the spammer, and tell him to stop damaging your reputation more than you already have done for yourself.

Bill Stanley, the spammer, with the help of his international team, is filling websites with hateful lies about me and my family and even worse... he is damaging the reputations of innocent doctors on this site by posting false information about them, which we have been deleting all day. The spammer is committing crimes of harassment, defamation, libel, and destruction of property.

For everyone else: We stand up for your right to speak freely. Don't let anyone ever intimidate you to give up your rights.

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