Yeah, big surprise. I know.
It turns out, about a year ago The Atlantic did a whole profile on the guy and it seems like nobody noticed. His name is Jesse Willms [sic] and, surprisingly, he's something of a douchebag:
In May 2011, after a year-and-a-half-long investigation that tracked his cash streams all the way to England and Cyprus, the FTC filed a sprawling lawsuit against Willms. The agency’s allegations were enough to drive an icy spike of fear into the heart of anyone who has ever typed in a credit-card number online: between 2007 and 2011, the lawsuit claimed, Willms defrauded consumers of some $467 million by enticing them to sign up for “risk free” product trials and then billing their cards recurring fees for a litany of automatically enrolled services they hadn’t noticed in the fine print. In just a few months, Willms’s companies could charge a consumer hundreds of dollars like this, and making the flurry of debits stop was such a convoluted process for those ensnared by one of his schemes that some customers just canceled their credit cards and opened new ones.
If you’ve used the Internet at all in the past six years, your cursor has probably lingered over ads for Willms’s Web sites more times than you’d suspect. His pitches generally fit in nicely with what have become the classics of the dubious-ad genre: tropes like photos of comely newscasters alongside fake headlines such as “Shocking Diet Secrets Exposed!”; too-good-to-be-true stories of a “local mom” who “earns $629/day working from home”; clusters of text links for miracle teeth whiteners and “loopholes” entitling you to government grants; and most notorious of all, eye-grabbing animations of disappearing “belly fat” coupled with a tagline promising the same results if you follow “1 weird old trick.” (A clue: the “trick” involves typing in 16 digits and an expiration date.)
[. . .]
Simply accusing Willms of being a scammer does him a disservice; what he accomplished elicits something close to awe, even among his critics. “Jesse ran what was effectively a phantom empire scattered all over the world,” one of the many lawyers who have been involved in litigation against Willms told me. “His genius was that he was able to make it all function, and make it all look like a legitimate enterprise.”
So yeah, I figured that people here would be interested in this guy.
Also, I was thinking he might be worth making a "person" entry for, though since the lawsuit most of his online presence has been scrubbed, meaning that there won't be much to go on. He might also sue us.
