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If cybersquatter Robert
Paisola is the future of the internet, then we’re all in big trouble.
Posted
“WELCOME TO THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF
ROBERT PAISOLA.”
The greeting was scrawled in red on a
board in a conference room of a
Actually, the world of felon and alleged
Internet cyberpirate Robert Paisola
can be downright creepy. It seems the Internet—more so than patriotism—has
become the last refuge of scoundrels.
I promised the manager of the building where Paisola and I met not to reveal the property’s name and
address. She didn’t want to be associated with 39-year-old Paisola
in print, especially after learning he claimed it as
one of his offices. Nor did a self-described friend of his at
the complex, who held up his hands at the mention of Paisola
and walked away. One of Paisola’s relatives
even begged via e-mail that his family not be brought into any story.
Paisola, however, wanted to talk—at least for our first and
last interview. “I want front page,” he chanted.
So, for two and a half hours, we battled over
the truth about Paisola, founder and Chief Executive
Officer of a mysterious
While Western Capital Financial, Inc. is a
state-registered corporation, whether or not the company actually has offices
or employees beyond Paisola and the Lehi condo he rents from a relative is debatable at best. Paisola’s court-documented criminal past, which includes
convictions for insurance fraud, child pornography possession and false loan
applications, is not.
Paisola considers the past behind him. “I simply draw a line
and move forward,” he said. “That’s the way I am able to create what I create,
the abundance in my life. I do so by being able to simply say, ‘That was then, and I’ve paid my price to society for the
things I have done.’”
But, if such abundance exists, critics argue,
it may come in part from Paisola soliciting fees on
the Internet from people being pursued by debt collectors. He professes to be
an expert on debt collection on his Website MyCollector.com, but doesn’t reveal
that law enforcement agents shut down his first collection agency, and he went
to jail for submitting a false loan application.
Which perfectly illustrates the true wonder
of Paisola’s world: It’s built on an electronic
version of the street-corner hustle, Three Card Monte. Apparently with plenty
of time on his hands, Paisola endlessly shuffles and
multiplies Web pages so you never know where the truth is hiding—or if it’s
present at all.
Take Robert Paisola's
Western Capitol Foundation. Its Web page says it promotes “criminal offender
reform.” MSNBC even featured him as a prisoners'
rights advocate in a news segment in February. Yet Paisola
can’t cite a single prison he’s visited as an advocate or an ex-con he’s
helped.
His publicist says he “is quickly becoming one
of
Add to all this relentless puffery his
pressuring of companies large and small with innuendo-strewn blogs and Websites and the overwhelming impression is of a
man hiding his past from prying eyes with endless digital sleights of hand—even
as he claws at your wallet.
Consider this a cautionary tale: Robert Paisola would like nothing better than to pull you into one
of many scams, burrow under your skin and stay there.
BANNED TO JIFFY LUBE
Once I’d examined Paisola’s
rap sheet and his conservatively estimated 15 Websites, one fact became
startlingly clear: With so much personal information available on the Internet,
it’s inevitable that the Paisolas of this world—with
just a few minutes of research—can lob grenades packed with misleading
information and innuendo at whomever they choose with little or no consequence
to themselves.
But, if that was the impression I’d gained
from studying Paisola before our interview, he had a
different message to sell me. He was inspiring others through motivational
speaking to learn from his example of building a future after leaving prison.
“I want to be very clear up front: I stand
100 percent accountable for everything that has happened in my past,” Paisola boomed upon my arrival. His criminal experiences
“made me what I am today.” They’ve shown, he says, he can create change by
inspiring others with his example. “[I don’t] just sit back and go … I’m a
complete victim, I’ll never be able to overcome this, I’m forever banned to
[working at] Jiffy Lube.”
Paisola’s concern with an ex-convict’s future being restricted
to wiping dipsticks aside, I might have given him more of the benefit of the
doubt about his supposed achievements, if, 10 minutes into the interview, he
hadn’t whipped out a document bearing my name, my wife’s name, our old home
phone number, my home address, and the previous countries I’ve lived in.
He said he’d been informed I was asking
questions about him. Throwing that document in my face was his response. I told
him how uncomfortable his blatant attempt at intimidation made me.
“Tell me how it feels,” Paisola
demanded. “Describe it.”
He later deemed the personal invasion an
object lesson in what it takes to be an investigative reporter in the era of
the Internet and online information sources like LexisNexis.
If journalism in the 1970s was about thorough editing, today, “Mrs. Jones who
learns how to blog isn’t going to have checks and
balances,” he said. “She’s mad at the milkman because he’s not delivering the
milk. That’s where we are going.”
The Internet future Paisola
posited, and indeed represents, is already a reality. Under Section 230 of the
federal Communications Decency Act, the owner of a Website is not liable for
what third parties write on it. So the Internet’s a free-for-all, one
never-ending bathroom stall wall where you can scrawl whatever you want about
someone you don’t like—and it will never go away.
But for Paisola,
the Internet’s not just about instantaneous publication, regardless of
veracity. Like a contemporary version of James Thurber’s eternal dreamer Walter
Mitty—armed with a digital pen—Paisola
has built a labyrinth of Websites and blogs detailing
subsidiaries of his businesses and at least 10 supposed careers that speak
volumes about his desire to reinvent himself.
The reinvention extends to his criminal past.
When it comes to his child-porn-possession conviction, Paisola
chooses to rewrite history, even as the consequences of that very crime pursue
him into court.
The threat he poses, I discovered, is not
only to livelihoods and reputations. He can also steal a person's innocence.
Whether you’re a teenage girl in a small Texas town being questioned by local
police because, unknowingly, you have a registered sex offender from Utah
called Robert Paisola on your list of MySpace friends, or a journalist who thought his
professional neutrality was a shield that could not be breached, no one, it
seems, is immune.
The only thing he said that I felt I didn't
need to confirm during 150 minutes filled with obfuscation and evasion was, “I
guarantee you one thing: When you leave here, you will never, ever, ever forget
this interview as long as you live.”
LAWN-MOWER MAN
“Do you feel a presence when you’re
around me?” Paisola asked. “Do you feel a magnetism?”
What I felt was a hammering headache from
being constantly shouted at as I tried to extract his story. But in order to understand
Paisola’s dark Wizard of Oz persona, you need to see
the criminal roots from which it sprang.
Paisola was born in 1967, a date worth noting since he’s been
known on his MySpace pages to lop five years off his
age. He was raised a Mormon in
He studied business administration, he says,
at
Times were so good for awhile that the firm’s
principals’ Porsches lined the entry to Credit Control headquarters, Paisola boasted. But in February 1996, according to press
reports at that time, Utah County Attorney’s Office investigators shut the firm
down. Paisola faced 22 state charges of theft by
deception and one of racketeering, and one count of insurance fraud. He pleaded
guilty to the fraud charge in August.
In January 1997, Paisola
pleaded guilty to a federal charge of submitting a false loan application and
was sentenced in June 1997 to 30 months in prison with 60 months supervised
release. The state dropped its charges in exchange for the federal plea. He was
ordered to pay more than $132,000 in restitution.
Paisola served his time at Lompoc Correctional Facility in
Come May 1999, he was out of jail, on parole
and back in
He asked if I noticed anything unusual about
the picture.
“You were smiling,” I said. “Why on earth
would you smile?”
“To be completely clear it’s OK,” he said.
“If everybody lived in their past, Bill Clinton would probably have a difficult
time being paid anything to speak to anybody.”
MR. INVESTIGATIVE
Despite the fate of Credit Control
and a long list of small-claims court judgments, Paisola
nevertheless returned to handling others’ debts when he left jail, opening a
collection agency called Western Capital. Three years later, he was back in
court on charges of violating his parole by making two false loan applications.
At Paisola’s
sentencing hearing in July 2002, U.S. District Court Judge David Winder said,
“This man didn’t gain any understanding from his conviction on the prior
crimes, and he gets out, and there is just page after page fraudulently dealing
with other people here. … In order to keep him from committing crimes, he has
got to be incarcerated.”
Along with a 16-month sentence, Winder
ordered 18 months of supervised release that included participation in
mental-health treatment, no control over others’ assets or funds and no access
to computers. The Internet ban included “any Internet service provider,
bulletin board system or other public or private computer network.”
But according to material on his own
Websites, Paisola was soon breaking parole by promoting
Western Capital via the Internet.
Paisola said he recently quit retail debt collection to focus
on “helping people.” Through blogs and Websites, he
began assailing companies—whether debt collectors, real-estate agents, or
mortgage lenders—he claimed were abusing consumers. He
launched so-called “investigations” using his credentials as a self-proclaimed
senior journalist at “CNNlegal” and also as a member
of the University of Missouri-based Investigative Reporters and Editors [IRE]
organization. His critics argue that his promotion of ties to organizations
like IRE add weight to his spurious claims of wrongdoing and inspire fear in
those he pursues. Paisola evaded several requests to
produce either printed or electronic articles he’d been paid for. He did,
however, produce his IRE membership card.
I inquired with IRE president Brent Houston
about Paisola’s membership. Following a review of his
credentials and a request for any additional material,
Paisola continues to hold himself out as an IRE member,
despite being told of the nonprofit’s decision to revoke it. “As an accredited
reporter with IRE, we provide raw stories to some of the nations leading
publications,” he insisted by e-mail. “Many of the stories we do are
investigative in nature.” Paisola explained that
CNNlegal.com, for which he claimed to work as a senior journalist, is “a
conduit for these raw stories.”
Click on CNNlegal.com on
Paisola’s site and, until recently, you were taken to
CNN’s home page, giving the impression he worked for the 24-hour news network.
“CNN is a trademark of Turner Communications and that is why the site goes to
CNN.com,” he said.
Asked for comment, CNN spokeswoman Megan
Mahoney said, “We’re looking into this matter further and will take action as
we deem fit,” she said.
By purchasing sound-alike domain names like
CNNlegal.com, Paisola often leeches off the reputations
of brand-name outfits to give himself gravitas. In a lengthy letter of
complaint about Paisola to the Utah Attorney
General’s Office sent December 2006, a debt collector turned private
investigator named John Brewington explained, “Mr. Paisola steals whatever appeals to him. He takes names like
Trump, CNN, Sundance, IPO, Carnival Cruises and
changes them to make his own. There is no mistaking his intent.” That intent, Brewington said, is to get companies to pay him in exchange
for the domain names. “If the owners of the material make their dissatisfaction
known, Mr. Paisola posts their names on his Website
in a suggestion that they did something wrong.”
An AG spokesman said the office was not
pursuing any action against Paisola at that time.
ATTACK OF THE SPIDERS
Among Paisola-related
sites listed on Google are several dedicated to
attacking his character and claims. One is by a feisty, 75-year-old
debt-collection critic, Oklahoma-based Billie Bauer, who recently took to
calling Paisola “the thief in chief.” But of all Paisola’s critics, Brewington,
who’s on a self-appointed crusade to drag him into the light, is by far the
most ardent in his pursuit. Not that Paisola takes
such attacks lightly.
One of the stories Paisola
claims to have done through CNNlegal.com is his expose of Brewington
for “[defaming] my family.” Paisola claimed to have
forced Brewington to remove negative Websites he put
up about him.
Brewington said it was the other way around. He’s been
investigating Paisola from his home base of
A
Paisola tried to negotiate with Brewington.
“He was on my phone eight times that day. Finally I picked up. ‘Take it down or
get crushed,’ I told him.” The blog came down.
Along with his letter to the Utah AG, Brewington included a package of Western Capital Website
material and two recent lawsuits for cybersquatting
filed against Paisola. He claimed Paisola
was “a danger to the worldwide community.”
Brewington makes no bones about his mission to expose Paisola. “Paisola’s a predator,”
he said. For Brewington, it’s his duty to protect the
weak. “I hate bullies,” he said.
Even though Brewington
severely doubted Paisola’s abilities as an
investigator, that doesn’t reduce the threat Paisola
poses on the Internet, he said.
“Isn’t he committing murder as well, [by]
assassinating a business, a character?” he said.
DIGITAL DRIVE-BYS
One business reputation Paisola’s attacked is that of Scottsdale, Ariz.-based
mortgage lender, William Spain, who owns a company called Provident Partners.
“[Paisola’s second]
ex-wife worked for us,”
Paisola said he became involved with
The “hassling” took the form of a Website
entitled “Provident Partners—the facts.” (Paisola put
up a similar site promising the “facts” about Salt Lake City Weekly in
late April and also bought the domain names SLWeekly.net, SLWeekly.org and SLWeekly.info. At press time, these domains redirected
browsers to City Weekly
's official site, SLWeekly.com, but were still under Paisola's control.)
“He’s trying to be a disturbance in the
business,”
All Paisola could
come up with on his Website regarding
Finally,
Paisola agreed: “I have no problem taking on some of the
biggest corporations in the world,”
Ameriprise, in a September 2006 complaint filed in
In January 2007, Ameriprise
obtained a default judgment against Paisola in U.S.
District Court for $10,000, plus attorneys’ fees of $17,000. Asked for comment,
all Paisola would say is “bring
it on.”
IPA’s management, through a spokesman, said they enjoy “an
amicable relationship with Robert Paisola.” This
seems odd, given the torture he put the company through,
including, according to court documents, “a campaign of false, misleading and
defamatory Internet postings … and not-so-veiled threats against IPA’s officers and employees.” Paisola’s
alleged demands for payment started at $56,000 but wound up at $10 million and
climbing.
“Whereas Paisola
recently conducted himself with a feigned appearance of legitimate,
business-like professionalism,” IPA’s counsel wrote
in court filings, “within the past week, his behavior has become irrational,
profane and bizarre in his own ranting Website posts …”
IPA and Paisola
came to an agreement that involved the issuing of a permanent injunction
prohibiting him from “posting, publishing or disseminating any information,
statements, recordings or images … purporting to be, either expressly or
implicitly, about IPA.” He also had to transfer ownership of any and all domain
names related to IPA, including IpaOpinion.com and IpaRipoff.com
SYMPATHY FOR THE
DEVIL?
“Is it essential to bring up the
sex-offender issue and the historical relevance of that as to where I’m at now,
past the 2-year mark [of leaving jail], moving forward, bringing change to the
world?” Paisola asked.
“It’s part of your story,” I said.
“But do you get I’m not this creepy little
guy, it’s not like that?”
“Yes,” I said.
I’m not sure why I said "yes."
Having spent more than two hours with him, there had been moments, such as his
constant mimicking of my body posture, that were oddly amusing in his
less-than-subtle attempts to manipulate me.
But for all his attempts at denial or
dismissal, for the harping on how his past has made him great, at the
disturbing heart of Robert Paisola’s story arguably
lies a series of horrific images involving children and his incessant efforts
to squirm out of the moral sanction his ownership of them imposed on the rest
of his life.
“Whenever I think of child porn, I think of a
child being sexually molested,” Paisola said. “I have
never seen anything, and you can talk to any investigator, anything that
represented that in any of my cases. Nothing. Not one
iota, not one picture that would be considered sexually deviant.”
In our interview, Paisola
claimed the porn found on his computer in 1996 were images from a nudist group,
included among 50,000 pictures a friend gave him on a software program.
Federal court documents reveal, however, that
U.S. Customs investigators found images not only of naked prepubescent girls
but also of children engaged in explicit sexual acts. Employees of his Internet
service provider discovered the porn after learning Paisola
had far exceeded his contractual space limits. They told investigators Paisola tried to delete the images. Court documents also
show he acknowledged “he was aware that the photographs were there.”
All this seems to contradict a statement made
in a press release Paisola’s publicist e-mailed me
that his “unsecured computer” contained “images which were not viewed, used,
passed along nor satisfied any concept of personal sexual fulfillment or
deviation.”
I asked via e-mail if it’s appropriate for a
man on the brink of 40, with a conviction for a child-sex offense, to have
among his 47 “friends” on two MySpace pages—which
states “I will tell no lies …”—nearly two dozen women in their early 20s in
various states of undress.
“I have hundreds of friends and supporters
and the belief that age is an issue with adult [sic] is uncanny,” he wrote
back. “The sex-offense conviction was 10 years ago [almost eight years ago,
according to court documents] and I have proven that is not who I am.”
But for a then-17-year-old girl who graduated
in 2006 from
A rural community southeast of Dallas,
population 3,000, Crandall is a close-knit town, said the student’s high school
coach, Brian Barnett.
Last summer,
“It was really creepy to go to that guy’s MySpace page, see his picture there, then go to the State
of
MySpace closed down Paisola’s page,
Brewington said. But by the end of April 2007, he had
two MySpace pages under the name of Moneytrainer. One featured a 17-year-old
A POWERFUL GUY
However much Paisola downplays his
porn conviction, it still follows him around. A Lehi
detective arrested Paisola last September after
finding discrepancies on his Utah Sex Offender Registry listing. At the end of
a mid-April preliminary hearing, 4th District Court Judge Samuel McVey found
probable cause against Paisola for two counts of
failing to register. His arraignment is set for June 25.
In an e-mail, Paisola
explained his arrest was based on the misspelling of his home address on the
sex-offender site and his failure to register the second Lexus he’d purchased.
What Paisola neglected to mention was that for more
than a year, his home address on the state Website was the same as Western
Capital’s principal offices—a UPS store mailbox in Draper.
At the end of our interview, Paisola called up his Website. He had announced our
interview and the forthcoming story. Alongside my name, he'd put my home
address. Trembling with rage at yet another attempt at bullying me with my own
information, I asked him between clenched teeth to take it off.
“Would you like me to take it off?” he cooed,
smiling up at me with his empty eyes. “You know that it is my honor to take it
off.”
On his lips, the word honor seemed
obscene. I ached to hit him. Instead, I held out my hand. He stared at it for a
moment, then stood up, took it and held my elbow with his other hand. “I’m
honored to meet your request, to do that for you,” he said.
“You shouldn’t have put it there in the first
place,” I said, jerking my hand out of his grip.
“I didn’t know who you were, my friend.”
No one, he seemed to be saying, had the right
to ask questions about Paisola, and certainly should
not expect to walk away from such efforts unscathed. What he wanted me to
understand, I realized, was the power he had to cyberstalk
me before I’d written one word about him.
“Power?” he said with a half-smile. “I’m a
tender, loving, caring, powerful guy. Yes, I am.”
He was right about one thing, I thought, as I
stepped out of his makeshift lair into the sunlight. This was an interview I
wouldn’t soon forget.