How to Remove False and Defamatory Pissed Consumer Reviews
Pissed Consumer – branded as a “premier consumer advocacy group” – is home to countless online reviews and complaints about businesses across dozens of industries. For many small- and medium-sized businesses, false and defamatory reviews on Pissed Consumer can be quite harmful.
Fortunately for these businesses and business owners, Pissed Consumer does offer removal options for defamatory reviews, content that violates the website’s terms and conditions.
The two primary ways of getting a false Pissed Consumer review removed from the website are: 1) presenting Pissed Consumer with a court order against the author of the false review; and 2) having the author of the false review submit a notarized letter to the website requesting removal.
Court Order Approach
Many complaint- or review-based websites are not very amenable, if at all, to court orders. In varying degrees, this includes Ripoff Report, Glassdoor and the lesser known ComplaintsBureau.com, just to name a few. That being said, Pissed Consumer is willing to entertain court orders and, accordingly, typically will remove false reviews in response to an order from a court.
When it comes to defamatory Pissed Consumer reviews, a harmed business or professional may wish to seek a judgment from the court that 1) declares the content located at a PissedConsumer.com URL to be unlawful, and 2) mandates removal of the URLs from the internet.
Such an order must be against the actual poster of the review – not Pissed Consumer itself – and this can only be obtained, whether via a default judgment or through an agreed order, after a lawsuit has been filed.
Upon obtaining a signed order from the court, the harmed party’s legal counsel can submit the order to Pissed Consumer’s legal department and, from there, Pissed Consumer will likely remove the content from the website.
Once a review has been removed from PissedConsumer.com, counsel might consider submitting an outdated page removal request to Google in order to speed up the process of getting the recently deleted content removed from the search results (it will eventually drop out at an unknown date if no action is taken, and the same can be said for Bing).
Notarized Letter Approach
Alternatively, if the author of a false and defamatory Pissed Consumer review admits his or her wrongdoing (or at least he or she agrees to try and get the content removed) – which may be preceded by identifying the author through the subpoena process – he or she can submit a notarized letter to Pissed Consumer and request removal of the post.
Directly from the website itself, the following are required to be in the letter:
- “A statement that you are the user who posted the information that you now seek to remove;
- A statement that the information previously posted by you was incorrect at the time it was posted;
- Your full name, mailing address, email address and signature;
- The URL (Address) of the subject post as it appears on PissedConsumer.com;
- The statement “I declare under penalty of perjury that the information provided in this request is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge.”
- Legible notary stamp (please make sure we can read commission or id number).”
A notarized letter can be submitted via mail to: Consumer Opinion LLC, 1930 Village Center Circle #3-6853, Las Vegas, NV 89134, or by uploading the file and submitting it online via Pissed Consumer’s contact page.
For more information, contact Whitney Gibson at 855.542.9192 or wcgibson@vorys.com. Read more about the practice at http://www.defamationremovalattorneys.com and follow @WhitneyCGibson on Twitter.
