Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/418584
12 • DECEMBER 2014 • WORLD FENCE NEWS Florida fence industry fights back against "serial author" bogus online poster BY JESSICA BURTON, VP OF SALES & MARKETING, POLY VINYL CREATIONS, INC., HUDSON, FLORIDA PRESIDENT, CENTRAL FLORIDA CHAPTER, AMERICAN FENCE ASSOCIATION Do you ever type in Google and search your name to see what comes up? How about your business or its competitors? Well, one day A Perfect 10 Fenc- ing did just that and was surprised at what they saw. Their name came up on ripoffreport.com with a very de- rogatory review. Tobias Eastin, the owner of A Per- fect 10 Fencing, takes his online repu- tation very seriously as they receive a lot of leads off the internet and imme- diately read the review. He was extremely upset as he read through it, trying to figure out who might be writing this about his com- pany. So that you can visualize how someone might be reading this about two before you have XXX Fence Co. come out. I moved out of state to start my own restaurant business and left XXX Fence Co. back in 2011. Own- ing a restaurant business and offering quality food and taking care of my customers are my number one goal, so anything below that would bother me; this is why I wanted to write this review about XXX Fence Co. Here's some good info for customers to think about first before you have XXX Fence Co. come out. High reviews that you find with this company are just plain their company, here is the text of the original false report, which is being attributed to an anonymous and still unidentified "serial author." I have "x"ed out the name of the company, as this was filed on at least 23 other local fence companies. No need to single out A Perfect 10. This is verba- tim from the online post: XXX Fence Co. is a horrible com- pany to have install your fence hud- son Florida I use to work for XXX Fence Co. and wanted to tell people a thing or out bogus. They claim to offer such "great work", but the owner of XXX Fence Co. is just your typical Pasco county drug addict trying to make a quick buck. Yea, they might be cheap- er than most companies out there, BUT they order cheap china fencing and presents a bogus booklet to cus- tomers during a quote claiming that his fence is "USA" made and offers a "lifetime warranty" on the fence. This is bogus by all means. The fence you see when they come out is NOT what you will be getting. Your fence might look pretty once they get done putting it up, BUT give it about 2-6 months and you will start to see the fence sag and gates bow in. WHY? Because the fence is very cheaply made, along with them not using concrete on any of the post or gates for reinforcement and I asked XXX Fence Co. once why they don't use concrete on the fencing post or gates, the response were "to make more profit from the job and to get the job done quicker." As Mr. Eastin with A Perfect 10 Fencing started to research further, he noticed this same online negative review existed for a few of his local competitors. He immediately reached out to them to advise them of what was go- ing on. They each were startled by this. Then Mr. Eastin's next action was to contact me, in my capacity as president of the Central Florida Chap- ter of the American Fence Associa- tion, which represents fence contrac- tors in Central and North Florida, to see what, if anything, the association could do for him. Even though A Perfect 10 Fenc- ing is not currently a member of the American Fence Association, Mr. Eastin has known me for some time and knew if anyone would help, that I would do so. In my office, I began researching these reports and had found a total of 12 companies who were listed with extremely similar reports. I also re- searched ripoffreport.com and decid- ed to try to contact them. I immediately drafted a letter to ripoffreport.com illustrating my concerns about these inflammatory and obviously dubious reports on the ripoffreport.com web site. At first, I was stonewalled by their support and legal departments, which I expected to happen. However, after I reached the founder of RipOff Report.com, Ed Magedson, he researched my request which had increased to 16 reports in a short time period that were posted in July 2014. After Mr. Magedson did his due diligence, he agreed that there was someone who was unscrupulously continued on page 40