ShareThisCheating on his wife was not Steve's first or worst mistake. His real problem was that he had married a woman whose brother had a flair for revenge.Steve's brother-in-law -- we'll call him Tim -- didn't squeeze apologies out of the adulterer in a boozy back-alley fight, didn't key his car, slash his tires or even help his sister hire a shark of a lawyer.What Tim did was more modern -- and meaner. He took his rage online, where it could run rampant. On Web sites and in chat rooms, Tim called Steve a cheat, a liar and worse. Wherever he could, he soured Steve's name and shamed him online for the world to see.And when he was done, instead of feeling triumphant, Tim realized he felt really, really bad. But it was too late. Tim's fury had become bigger than the brother-in-law himself. His hate had been cast so far and wide in the Internet ether that he couldn't take it down or take it back.So he hired someone else to: ReputationDefender, a California company that specializes in the erasure of Internet embarrassments and harassment -- a crime-scene cleanup of the digital age. Tim hired the company to seek out and destroy all his nasty postings, and he's just one of the company's thousands of clients.Want to ax those blurry photos from the Antigua nudist resort, the ones the boss saw? Dying to bury the online diary an ex was writing, the one that details the drugs you two did together? Desperate to spike the nasty little posting on that blog that made you sound nuts? Hoping to hide that Web site someone started just to make you look bad?It happens all the time, ReputationDefender Chief Executive Michael Fertik says."Maybe you just want to establish your good name on the Web," Fertik said. "Maybe you're doing it to bury some bad stuff."A lot of people want to do one or the other or both.The company launched in October 2006. One year later, ReputationDefender's revenue was up 2,500 percent, and the company had made its first million dollars, Fertik said.Basic services are just shy of $10. More complicated cases cost more. ReputationDefender recently set its base rate for challenging jobs at $25,000.It has been successful enough that copycat companies are cropping up -- defendmyname.com, reputationhawk.com, chatterguard.com and so on.ReputationDefender has had 28 clients from Nevada, 27 of whom refused to comment. For the same reasons Steve and Tim don't want their real names online, Nevada's Internet ashamed and remorseful didn't want to talk about it. They hired Fertik to make their names vanish, not appear in newspaper articles.Reno student Abel del Real Nava, 18, was the only Nevada ReputationDefender client willing to talk. He signed up for the company's $9.95 monthly service, MyReputation. All it does, really, is scan the Internet for information about you. If you don't like what it finds, the company will destroy it for $29.95. Combing the Internet, the company came up with a heated online exchange del Real Nava had with someone over a decidedly uncool thing to argue about: the virtues of Macintosh vs. Microsoft.Of course, that he cared enough to argue about it, and then duked it out online, is evidence of why Fertik's company can't help but grow. So much of what matters to a kid like del Real Nava happens on the Internet, or is in some way related to technology: his MySpace page, the Web sites where he gets his news, the smart cell phone that allows him to be online all the time. But a life lived online can haunt you forever, and del Real Nava was afraid a prospective employer would Google his name (as one in five does, studies show) and refuse to hire him when he or she saw the colorful language he'd used to make his point about a computer brand.ReputationDefender got rid of the dialogue. Fertik won't say how, except that it's a guarded combination of asking nicely and skewing Internet search schematics. A "math problem" that makes things go away, he says. Think of it as the Internet mafia's cement shoes."If you are ruining other people's lives," Fertik said, "prepare for the consequences."(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
A crime-scene cleanup of the digital age
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