The Real Rip-Off Report

It's not exactly easy to book an interview with  Ed Magedson , the self-described consumer advocate and creator of the wildly successful  www.RipOffReport.com .

Not because he doesn't want to talk. Magedson loves talking, especially when the subject is his beloved Web site.

It's just that he's so incredibly particular. Arranging one simple meeting is an exercise that captures, perfectly, why Magedson is so good at getting results — and why he's infuriated the CEOs of several midsize companies to the point that they accuse him, flatly, of extortion. He overthinks every detail. And it would never occur to him to stop pushing before he gets what he wants, even if he's not sure what that is.

First there's where to meet. It has to be a public place. A dog park? A restaurant? Even after Magedson decides on lunch at Chompie's, he calls back with instructions about which bank of booths to pick. He's planning to park in the handicapped spot, he says, and from the right booth, he'll be able to keep an eye on his dog.

After discussing that issue for 15 minutes, he calls back to clarify: It can't be just any booth near the window. It has to be the one closest to the servers' station, to allow both dog-seeing and laptop use.

In the end, the dog is basically ignored, and Magedson doesn't even bring his laptop into the restaurant. (Yes, he parks in the handicapped spot. And, no, he's not disabled. He has a handicapped sticker, but it belonged to his late father. "I'm not perfect," he says.)

But he does get his booth of choice. It opens up just as he walks in the door.

"Things like this always happen to me," he says, beaming.

Throughout a three-hour meal of bagels, lox, and whitefish salad, Magedson runs his servers ragged. He needs butter, which doesn't come with his order, and another container of cream cheese, even though he isn't done with the one he has. Then, despite a bowl of creamers on the table, he asks two different waiters to bring him more, only to seem confused when the table ends up with three bowls' worth. And only after the bill arrives does he remember that he needs hamburger for his dog. After  that bill arrives, as it turns out, he needs orange juice. And when the juice arrives, it's too small, so a waitress is dispatched to bring him a second one.

He's relentless — and he's not even out of sorts. On the contrary, Ed Magedson is enjoying himself immensely. It's just that he's so used to agitating, to throwing everything he can at the wall, just in case something needs to stick. He doesn't know how else to behave.

He's the postmodern Columbo, a shambling figure who eventually gets his way not because he's slick or charming, but because he wears people down. He is a nitpicker, a fighter, a squeaky wheel who's mastered the art of getting grease.

He's exactly what you'd expect of a self-titled consumer advocate, with one key difference.

Thanks to the Internet, people actually have to pay attention to him.

Before the rise of the Web, the powerful could write off gadflies such as Ed Magedson. But the Internet provides a bully pulpit that Magedson has harnessed with startling success — and woe to the business owner who tries to ignore him.

The Rip-Off Report has become a boon to the disgruntled, who've posted complaints taking on everything from poor business practices to deadbeat dads, ofen without a shred of proof. For Ed Magedson, it's been an even bigger gift. It's made him powerful, and it's made him money — although certainly not a dot-com millionaire.

Magedson won't remove posts. He's not interested in evidence that would offer vindication.

But if you're willing to pay, Ed Magedson just might be willing to talk.

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Magedson guards his privacy maniacally. His business address is a post office box. The house where he lived until recently was owned by one of his limited liability companies — and he had to move, he says, when his enemies figured out his location, despite his precautions. Even his car and utilities are registered in a way that renders them untraceable.

To Magedson's credit, people only know how hard he's worked to hide because they've tried just as hard to find him. He says they want to kill him. (They say they only want to serve him with lawsuits . . . although they're certainly not above posting information about him on the Internet while they're at it.)

But despite his efforts to live off the public-records grid, there's plenty you can know about Ed Magedson without even talking to him: the legal battles, the allegations of extortion, even his parents' death certificates and the paperwork from that old 1970s pot bust.

That's the Internet for you. And if Magedson is virtually anonymous in  Maricopa County , where he's lived for almost two decades, he's famous on the Internet.

Before the Internet became ubiquitous, you could only humiliate someone if you had connections, if you could get the attention of a newspaper reporter or were willing to picket in front of an office. Today, you can get revenge with just a few keystrokes — and face revenge just as easily.

Magedson (pronounced MAJ-id-sen) has been on both sides.

He claims that it doesn't bother him. "When people stop suing me, and stop talking about me, and stop threatening me, that's when I'll have to worry," he says during an early conversation. In the course of being interviewed for the story, he'll repeat the statement no fewer than three times.

Magedson came late to computers, and he's still not, by any means, a techie. But he latched on to a successful Internet game plan in the mid-'90s, even before the dot-com frenzy began, and he never wavered. In its eight years of operation, his Web site has managed to do what so few Web sites have done: It found readers. Today, it's even making money.

The site is called the Rip-Off Report. A clearinghouse for customer complaints, it boasts 8  billion hits, more than 225,000 user-written "reports" on various companies, and enough unsubstantiated allegations to make a CEO contemplate suicide.

The Rip-Off Report's power comes from its technical mastery. Before many people had even heard of  Google , the Rip-Off Report had figured out how to land at the top of its searches. In other words, Google a company's name, and almost immediately you get a report trashing the business — far more interesting than a corporate Web site.

Companies that haven't spent millions on marketing or on a major Web presence are particularly susceptible: Zazou Model Management, the  Rebate Processing Center . But even  Primerica , the well-known financial services division of  Citigroup , hasn't been immune. Google the company, and the Rip-Off Report is in the top three links.

And so customers who couldn't get a return call from a service rep, much less a TV station, suddenly have the online equivalent of a megaphone.

But  www.RipOffReport.com isn't just a place to vent: Class-action lawyers, government investigators and reporters all use it to find victims. Not coincidentally, it's been credited with torpedoing more than one lousy business — and given Magedson a national reputation as a consumer advocate and a  First Amendment warrior.  He relishes that role. Talking about his work, he tends to slip into the third person, as if he's dreaming aloud about how his story should be told.

"Ed knows it's sweeps week when he gets calls from reporters around the country looking for scams," he says, then repeats it later for good measure. Or, "Ed was formulating what he wanted to do . . ."

For all his self-aggrandizement, Magedson is well aware that his advocacy persona has lately come under fire. (Initially, he urged  New Times to check out the threats he's faced and the lawsuits against him, only to e-mail later how "disappointed" he is that his worst critic has been interviewed.)

Just as Magedson has spent his life dogging people in power, now people are dogging him. More than a dozen companies have sued him. And, though he initially denies it, court records show that he's sued at least one business owner, too.

He revels in his role as a true-blue advocate. But with at least 30 companies now paying him to mitigate bad reports on his Web site, Magedson is facing sticky ethical questions.

Critics ask how he can accept payment from the same companies that he claims to be fighting — especially when he used to be so critical of the  Better Business Bureau for the same thing.

And if he's using reports with dubious accuracy to pad his own pockets, does that make him a First Amendment champion — or an extortionist?

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Fifty-five years old, raised on  Long Island , Magedson has the nasal voice of a movie sidekick — think  Bruno Kirby in  When Harry Met Sally . . . , whom he somewhat resembles. But his hair is pure  "Weird Al" Yankovic : Almost entirely bald on top, he wears it long and curly everywhere else.

This isn't vanity, a middle-aged man posing as a kid. Instead, it's the remnant of a hippie past, Magedson's way of clinging to his outsider status even today.

Magedson had his run-in with City Hall when, as a college drop-out in the '70s, he started a coast-to-coast network of street-corner flower stands. He found himself embattled in every town, and at every turn: "I was dealing with all these government agencies, and the lies that the bureaucracy would tell you. The city would have staff members, so-called staff members — most of the time, they're a bunch of liars."

Even though city bureaucrats caused his flower business to fail, he says, he was left with a small fortune. So he moved to  upstate New York and invested in  HUD housing.

Once again, the town fathers used every trick in the book to stop him, he says. They redrew the regulations for low-income housing; people called him a slumlord; the police harassed him.

He sued them, but he lost.

Wanting to be near his elderly parents, Magedson moved to Mesa. He started an indoor swap meet at a strip mall at  Gilbert and Main. Again, he says, city inspectors did all they could to drive him out.

Again, he sued; again, court records show, he lost. The appeals court refused even to hear his case. And when Magedson's landlord sued him for back rent, court records show, he ended up owing more than a few grand.

It was only after that fiasco that he met Mesa attorney  Dale Thorson — and discovered his second act as a consumer advocate and Internet entrepreneur.

Thorson was doing estate planning for Magedson's parents, and got to chatting with Magedson. Thorson was impressed with tax work Magedson had done for another family member and told him so. "The kid is brilliant," Thorson says. "Just very, very intelligent."

Magedson asked Thorson if he had any clients who needed help. Living with his parents, his expenses provided for, he wanted to use his skills to get justice for people who needed it.

Thorson asked him to take a look at a case involving an elderly couple who'd been screwed by a rug cleaner. Magedson ended up recouping their entire investment, Thorson says, and the couple was grateful to have avoided a court case.

As for Thorson, he was thrilled by the energy Magedson devoted to his task — and that the fledgling advocate refused to charge the people anything for his services when he was done.

In no time, Thorson says, he was asking Magedson to assist a number of people who'd come to him needing help. "He's not this slick guy," he says. "He's the Columbo guy" — like the TV detective played by  Peter Falk , whose awkward manner can conceal a sharp mind and an uncommon persistence.

"There isn't a challenge he didn't take on," Thorson continues. "I can't think of one where he didn't get positive results. Sometimes the client didn't want to keep going on the case, and they'd drop it. But it was never because Ed wanted to give up."

Magedson began distributing a flier, promising, for $250, to help people fight against a corrupt City Hall or companies that had screwed them. He says he never actually charged the fee; instead, he used it to weed out people who weren't serious about pursuing their claims.

He began to hone a process of just how to fight The Man, to develop a formula that really worked. He was planning to write a book. (Today he sells that book, a slim paperback, from the Rip-Off Report for $21.95. Not to give away a trade secret, but the formula basically comes down to threats to picket, and then picketing.)

One day in the mid-'90s, visiting a shop owned by some of his former swap-meet tenants, he says, he met a woman who designed Web sites. Hearing about his unusual line of work, she asked him, "Why don't you make a Web site?"

And that was the start. Before that, Magedson says, "I didn't even know how to turn a computer on." But the site, a simple ad for his advocacy services, took off: "I got people to call me. I thought, 'Gee whiz!' Because I didn't believe in the Internet."

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From Magedson's initial foray into online advertising, the Rip-Off Report may seem like an obvious outgrowth today, with everyone doing business on the Web.

But Magedson was ahead of the curve. In 1998, when the  Monica Lewinsky scandal first became public on a Web site called the  Drudge Report , many Americans didn't even know how to access the Internet, much less use it to their advantage.

But that's the year Magedson registered the Rip-Off Report Web site. And like the Drudge Report, another early online juggernaut,  www.RipOffReport.com wasn't just a static presentation hawking a business. It  was the business.

Today, the Rip-Off Report seems old-fashioned next to even the simplest blog. It has none of the clean functionality that Google has perfected; it's a mad jumble, plagued with technical problems. More than half of  New Times ' searches on any given day ended in futility; the site lacks the technical capability to handle its own content. (Magedson says a long-awaited redesign should be online within the month.)

One reason for the tech problems is the site's massive volume: On top of the 225,000 initial complaints, the site has layer after layer of businesses' rebuttals and readers chiming in. And though it would probably increase the site's user-friendliness if posts of a certain age were deleted, Magedson doesn't like to get rid of anything. You can still get complaints dating back at least six years.

It doesn't help that the Rip-Off Report has a fairly low standard of relevance. An entire category has sprung up with people complaining about adulterous partners. At last count, it had 207 entries.

Magedson pays a team of stay-at-home moms to vet posts for obscenities and social security numbers. But beyond that, he admittedly finds few things too scurrilous for publication.

For example. Consider this post about a man who's identified by first and last name and hometown. The man is, "Lindsey" complains, "nothing but a loser. He steels [sic] from everybody including his own family. Not to mention he beats his own mother. . . .