Uncov got its first legal threat yesterday! I know that my post volume has slowed to a crawl, but I've been busy with a new job. In any event, this is an exciting new milestone.

CitizenRE is a company who is running, in my opinion, a hustle in the solar energy business. You sign up for CitizenRE, pay them a $500 "security deposit", and then monthly fees to rent solar panels for your house. You can sign up today, but the solar panels won't be delivered until they magically raise $650 million and build a solar panel plant that's the most efficient institution in the world. You'll pay them roughly what you'd pay your local electric company for solar energy. If this sounds like snake oil, that's because it is.

A solar rig for your house costs roughly $50,000. CitizenRE will hold you to a multi-year contract for their equipment, stretching up to 25 years. This is in effect an unsecured loan of $50,000. Oh yeah, this can't miss.

Furthermore, the company is running some kind of Mutli Level Marketing scheme where "Ecotrepreneurs" peddle this shit to unsuspecting homeowners. In fact, Rob Styler, the cocksteak who sent me the legal threat, was involved with a company called Equinox, a MLM company that was shut down for consumer fraud in 2000. He claims innocence, but has clearly never had a lesson in guilt by association.

Anyhow, here's the threat:

Your blog was brought to my attention. There are too many factual errors to deal with all of them at this time, so let's focus on two sentences:

If that wasn't awesome enough, Citizenre's is run by a bunch of clowns who used to work at Equinox, the illegal pyramid marketing scheme. Citizenre's founders did so much sketchy pyramid shit that they have been legally banned from pyramid marketing.

I am the only one of Citizenre's senior staff who was involved with Equinox (factual error #1). I worked with Equinox for 5 years, from 1992 to 1997. In 1996 we were ranked by INC Magazine "as the fastest growing privately held corporation in the U.S". In 1997, I uncovered what I felt to be unethical behavior. I left, wrote a book, and my book inspired a federal investigation. I became the lead federal witness for the government and Equinox was shut down for consumer fraud in April of 2000. The owner of Equinox, Bill Gouldd, was banned from network marketing, not me (factual error #2). Pyramids are illegal by definition and thus no one can be legally banned from an illegal activity (factual error #3).

I was on the board of directors for the Multi Level Marketing International Association and have never been banned or sanctioned from anything. You have a First Amendment right to share your opinion, but libel is not included in that right and libel has significant consequences, both legal and financial. Either you did no research or you are purposely spreading lies. You can look through the publicly available court documents regarding Equinox to gain the facts.

If you continue to post these lies on the web after your factual errors has been brought to your attention, I will have to assume that your intent is malicious and respond accordingly.

Best,

Rob Styler

This guy clearly does not understand how the internet works. The post he's referring to was written by one of our users, and he comes after me. That's like threatening Google for something that somebody wrote on Blogger. Since there's still a case pending to decide whether or not a service provider can be held liable for stuff printed on their service, I deleted the post. I don't have the time to go head to head with some born-again scam artist.

Anyway, fuck you, Rob. Threatening a website that has less than 10,000 readers. That's just tacky.