Amongst the many legal job search outfits out there is one called “Law Crossing,” which presents itself as a different sort of approach to finding a job as a lawyer.  Rather than charge those seeking to fill a position, it charges those looking for a job.  It’s the inverse of the Willie Sutton theory of bank robbery.

But as Cathy Gellis at Statements of Interest found out, that’s not the only function Law Crossing offers to the unemployed.  While she questioned whether Law Crossing was worth it, and concluded that it was not for a variety of reasons, she bought herself an entirely unanticipated bag of problems.  As I never knew how this worked before, Cathy’s explanation was an epiphany to me.

[M]y previous post is the third result on a Google-search for “Law Crossing.” It’s quite visible, and as some of the later comments on reflect, it apparently has been deterring people from doing business with Law Crossing.

What Law Crossing had done was to post a “hit” on Amazon’s mTurk service, offering to pay people for each testimonial they spammed my blog with. Services like mTurk are designed to broker piecework between willing workers with extra cycles and employers that have lots of small tasks needing doing.

While such a use of mTurk is a violation of Amazon’s policy, it doesn’t appear to have much impact on such use of mTurk, and while Amazon is against it and will deal with it once it becomes aware of it happening, that doesn’t help much when you’re the target of the spammers.

Check out mTurk is an interesting experience.  for a penny or two, “piece workers” are paid to spam (or perform such other trivial tasks that need to get done but aren’t worth hiring a real employee) on behalf of some business.  It’s not much, but if you spam enough, you can buy a burger off the dollar menu. 

When I’ve posted about certain businesses in a less than flattering way, I’ve experienced the joys of shills, magically appearing to spam me by either attacking me or supporting the business under scrutiny.  I wondered where these shills came from.  Now I know. 

Cathy castigates the practice as a reflection of corporate manipulation of thought and expression, paying to undermine legitimate assertions and challenges to business practices in order to create the fiction that a business is wonderful and anyone who challenges it is evil. 

I find corporate tactics that run roughshod over consumers to be particularly despicable — no one should do business with any company that helps itself to money it’s not entitled to, which, according to so many accounts, is what Law Crossing routinely does. But to have used me and my site, my audience and my credibility, to further their unsavory business practices is beyond the pale. Their behavior forbids my silence, which is why I post now as I do, so the world can easily see just what kind of company Law Crossing is.

The same goes for any other business that spams to cover its bad acts and legitimate complaints about its business practices.  The more people who realize that this is happening, the less effective this practice becomes, and the practice itself becomes an indictment of the business.  As for Law Crossing, I defer to Cathy’s judgment since I know nothing about the business itself.  But it’s use of spammers to protect itself from criticism speaks volumes.