How Contributors To The Neil Garfield Website Living Lies Fan The Flames Of Hysteria and Paranoia Without Doing Any Research

Steve Dibert, MFI-Miami

While at my niece’s birthday party, I received an email from a reporter asking me if I knew anything about the foreclosure activist site, Foreclosure Blues.  Apparently, he read on Neil Garfield’s Living Lies website that WordPress pulled the plug on it.  When I got back to my hotel, I checked out Living Lies and this is what Garfield wrote:

BLOGGERS ALERT! As the megabanks lose more and more ground in court, they are using their enormous resources to put pressure on those who oppose them and their tactics.”

This headline by Neil Garfield implies that the banks forced WordPress to pull the plug on the Foreclosure Blues site.  With the responses Neil Garfield received from this posting, a lot of his readers understood it the same way I did.

Unfortunately, this is not what happened.  Back in February, I was cc’ed on an email from Richard Vetstein, a bankruptcy attorney in Massacusetts, who was angry because Jake Naumer, the creator of the site, was lifting articles from his law firm’s site and other people’s websites without permission and without attributing the article to the respected writer. Apparently, this attorney also felt Jake Naumer’s actions were affecting his SEO.  Vetstein cc’ed the email to me, Matt Weidner, Mike Konczal and a few others attorneys and bloggers who’s articles Jake had harvested for the Foreclosure Blues website.

Matt Weidner and Richard Vetstein sent Jake Naumer several cease and desist emails demanding he take all their articles off Foreclosure Blues.  The few of us emailed back forth over this issue and the consensus was that if he didn’t comply with their request to remove their articles and to cease posting any new ones, we would complain to WordPress’s corporate parent, Automattic in San Francisco.  Several other email exchanges later went on between Jake Naumer and several of the attorneys with Naumer refusing to comply with their request.  He did comply with my request.  So I left it alone.

During the height of this situation, Jake Naumer emailed me saying he was considering taking the site down because it was discovered that he was misleading people about his Wall Street credentials.  It turns out he was a professional gambler not a Wall Street securitization expert as he claimed.

It was not the banks who forced WordPress to ax Foreclosure Blues, it was Jake Naumer violating copyright laws by lifting articles from other people that caused the site to be axed.

This is one of the reasons I have issues with the Foreclosure Activist community especially sites owned by Neil Garfield.  Neil Garfield and his band of groupies post blogs fanning the flames of paranoia before doing any research and blindly supporting someone who claims to be something he or she is not.