Vitaly Borker
Vitaly Borker, known by pseudonyms Tony Russo, Stanley Bolds and Becky S, is an American felon who has twice served federal prison sentences for charges arising from how he ran his online eyeglass retail and repair sites, DecorMyEyes and OpticsFast. Customers who complained about poor service and misfilled orders for high-end designer eyewear were insulted, harassed, threatened and sometimes made the victim of small scams. After going into online retail following a short career as a computer programmer for several Wall Street firms, Borker encountered difficult customers who, he later said, were rude, lied to him and cost him money unnecessarily. He decided to be rude and unscrupulous with them in return, and learned to his surprise that on the Internet there was no such thing as bad publicity since the many posts with links to his site on complaint sites such as Ripoff Report appeared to drive traffic to his sites due to how Google's PageRank algorithm worked at that time, putting his site higher in results for searches on brand names than even those brands' websites, and making him money.
When New York Times reporter David Segal investigated the site in 2010, Borker freely explained this business model to him when Segal came to visit his house in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay, where Borker questioned the notion that the customer is always right and said he "like the craziness." A month later Borker was arrested by federal postal inspectors and charged with mail fraud, wire fraud and making interstate threats. He eventually pleaded guilty to fraud charges and making threats and was sentenced to prison for four years. Google and other websites whose flaws he had exploited in running DecorMyEyes also changed their practices and tightened security procedures.
Before entering prison, Borker and a friend had begun setting up another website, OpticsFast, offering not only eyeglasses for sale but repair services. After his 2015 release, he went back to his former business practices, which he mostly hid from his probation officer. Two years later, Segal reported on Borker's return in the Times, and Borker was again arrested and charged with wire and mail fraud associated with alleged harassment and abuse as operator of OpticsFast. In February 2018, he was sentenced to two years in prison for violation of his 2015 parole. Following a plea deal for the 2017 charges, he was later sentenced in 2019 to two years in prison followed by three years of supervised release, a $50,000 fine, and a $300 special assessment.
Following Borker's release in late 2020, Segal reported in the Times in 2021 that Borker appeared to have returned to selling eyeglasses online, under other personal and business names, and harassing dissatisfied customers through a new site called Eyeglassesdepot. If true, this would be a violation of a condition of his 2021 parole that he avoid any involvement in online retailing. In early 2022 he was arrested again on fraud charges related to the new site; he pleaded guilty to wire fraud a year later.
Biography
Borker told New York Times reporter David Segal in 2010 that he was born in Russia and moved to the United States with his parents as a child; exactly how old he was at the time is not definitely known. After graduating from Edward R. Murrow High School in 1989 and John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 1997 he began training as a police officer, working as a cadet in the office of a unit that patrolled public housing in Brooklyn. He soon changed his mind about his career path and enrolled in a school to learn programming.Although all classes were taught in English, all the students and teachers at the school were also all Russian immigrants, Borker recalls. Students would be taught the bare minimum that would get them hired, and then the school would help them fabricate a résumé and work history to assure that they did. "There were a lot of schools like this," he said a decade later. "They've all been shut down."
Borker first went to work for a variety of Wall Street financial firms, including Lehman Brothers, where he worked on the systems that administered the accounts of mutual fund shareholders. Dissatisfied with the pay, Borker took a friend up on his side offer to create an online version of his eyeglass store. He continued running the online eyeglass store while he worked for Lehman, drawing lawsuits, and judgements, from luxury brands like Chanel for selling counterfeit glasses. Shortly before the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in the 2008 financial crisis, he left to go into online retailing full time.
DecorMyEyes
The website became DecorMyEyes. Borker became disillusioned with his customers, who he says lied and cost him unnecessarily by changing their minds. "I stopped caring", he says, and began responding rudely to them. This led to postings on review websites disparaging him, which, to his amazement, put DecorMyEyes near the top of Google search results due to the many links to his site. Seeing the value of this perverse incentive, Borker began purposely responding to dissatisfied customers with threats and insults. It was later reported that the site had made Borker $3.2 million in one year.Customers of DecorMyEyes posted numerous reports of receiving threats of physical violence, abuse, poor service and overcharges on websites such as ResellerRatings, where DecorMyEyes had, as of 2010, a lifetime rating of 1.39/10 from 79 reviews. One customer told authorities that after he complained someone had called his employer and accused him of dealing drugs. According to Borker, each bad review with a link boosted his site's PageRank, meaning that the site came to the top of Google's ratings for many of the products he sold. He showed the Times that his site actually came up higher than designer Christian Audigier's in a search on the designer's name. While a direct Google search for "DecorMyEyes" elicits the site and its many negative reviews, searching for individual products and brands does not.
The reason, cited by an anonymous Google publicist, is that the large number of links to DecorMyEyes from consumer complaint sites such as Ripoff Report cause DecorMyEyes to rank high in Google search results. In 2008 Borker made a post as "Stanley" on Get Satisfaction and other websites like it thanking users there for the links and the traffic they had brought him. When the website's administrators sent him an email suggesting he could work with them to work things out, he replied with a photograph of his hand with middle finger extended.
Borker said most of his customers were satisfied; he called those who were not "psychos". He questioned the notion that the customer is always right. "ot here, you understand?" he told Segal. "Why is the merchant always wrong? Can the customer ever be wrong? Is that not possible?" He allowed that the stress might well be affecting his health, but doubted he would walk away from the site. "I like the craziness. This works for me", he said, likening himself to radio shock jock Howard Stern.
Borker used other websites in his business. He often sourced his glasses from sellers on eBay and told them simply to ship them to his customers' address. If the seller declined, as several did when the address had not been verified by PayPal, he left a negative review on their page, which many wanted to avoid. When sellers blocked Borker, he registered under a different name; after this was reported, eBay barred Borker from the site permanently and instituted other reforms to prevent such tactics and identify abusive buyers. Borker also maintained a store on Amazon.com under a different name, where he was much more fastidious in his dealings with customers, since that platform was willing to remove sellers if it got enough customer complaints.
Since credit card companies, in their agreements with sellers, can cancel the service if they receive enough "chargebacks" or buyer disputes every month, Borker told the Times he tried to make sure he avoided alienating too many. Some customers say that he threatened them to drop the dispute, sometimes suggesting he was willing to employ physical violence and emailing them pictures of their houses from Google Earth. One told Segal that her bank dropped the dispute and reinstated her charge after a woman claiming to be her called and said she no longer wished to do so.
Google responded to the Times story by writing an algorithm that "detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience" and significantly reduces their search visibility on product searches. MasterCard had dropped DecorMyEyes in 2009 due to excessive chargebacks. Borker regained access to their network by using a different bank. The company told the Times that he should not have been able to do this as he was supposed to have been placed on an internal blacklist; in the wake of the story it told Segal that it had not only put him on that list but increased its safeguards to make sure that those who were supposed to be blacklisted were. Borker responded that it was impossible to shut people down completely online. "I'd use the name of a friend of mine", he suggested. "Give him 1 percent."
2010 arrest and federal charges
A week after the Times story Borker was arrested by agents of the United States Postal Inspection Service on charges of mail fraud, wire fraud, making interstate threats and cyberstalking, and arraigned in the United States District Court in Manhattan. Bail was denied on the basis that he was a threat to the community. A search of his house turned up a stock of counterfeit eyeglasses, and fake 8mm replica guns. State charges were dismissed. After months of confinement in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, Borker was freed in April 2011 upon posting $1 million bond and accepting restrictions that included accepting surveillance by a security guard in his home, at a cost to him of a thousand dollars a day.In May 2011, Borker pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Manhattan to two counts of interstate communication of threats, one count of mail fraud and one count of wire fraud. In September 2012, Borker was sentenced to four years in federal prison and ordered to pay nearly $100,000 in fines and restitution. He was released four years later.