Jason Hope’s (JAWA/Cylon) lawyers send cease and desist to AZDisruptors

By on March 28th, 2011 In PR Fail

Oh, these incident regarding Jason Hope of JAWA/Cylon’s alleged text messaging scams are getting a bit more interesting. It seems Hamid over at AZDisruptors has grabbed the attention of their lawyers for continuing to make allegations against Hope and company. They sent him a cease and desist letter.

In this letter, they outlined a few things -

  • Hamid’s statements rose to the level of defamation
  • Hamid’s actions were an attempt to deflect attention from his OWN criminal activity
  • Asked for removal of ALL offending posts
  • Write a stickied apology

Oh, and they sent a letter to Squarespace, which shut down Hamid’s site without notifying him.

I’m no lawyer, but that letter seems pretty flimsy. In essence, it says we will expose you if you don’t stop saying mean things about us, which seems more like whining than anything else. I could be wrong, but first impressions certainly count.

What I’m most concerned about here was SquareSpace’s actions in taking AZDisruptors.com offline. Since when was ONE cease and desist letter enough to take down an entire site? Unless you’re a suspected torrent site that’s been seized by Homeland Security, it seems very odd to me to see this sort of thing happen.

You think they’ll come after Valley PR Blog next? I certainly hope Len Gutman checks his mail, because I’d very much like to publish THAT letter.

Now I know that The Lavidge Company has nothing to do with this side of Jason Hope’s business (they were hired to promote his philanthropic efforts), but as a company that says “We accept responsibility and accountability, and we believe that integrity is our truest asset,” they should seriously reconsider if their values align with JAWA/Cylon’s. Or maybe they should ask to start advising Jason Hope on his entire business and hopefully explain to them that cease and desist letters that threaten to “expose” someone sound terrible.

We need a hashtag for this. #scandalAZ?

(UPDATE – AT&T is now looking into JAWA.)

Comments

Guy Reynolds Says:
March 28th, 2011 at 9:41 am

Classic move by a lawyer. People are so scared to death of lawyers, especially at the thought of possible action against their business, that most will simply cower to any kind of letter of demand before taking a deep breath and thinking first.

And SquareSpace just dropped their pants by pulling the AZ Disruptors site.

francine hardaway Says:
March 28th, 2011 at 10:18 am

My geek friends in Silicon Valley are increasingly worried that we host important stuff on sites that have to loyalty to us. This is a very interesting issue, and shows that SquareSpace doesn’t really know what it is doing in the legal arena.

Jim Veihdeffer Says:
March 30th, 2011 at 12:18 pm

Can someone clarify what the actual legal status of a cease and desist letter is? That is, does it have legal force to stop someone from continuing what they’re doing, or is it more of a warning that says, in effect, “Hey, cut it out or we’re going to sue you.”?

tdhurst Says:
March 30th, 2011 at 12:20 pm

Jim –
The latter. It’s nothing more than a formal request.

Nathan Says:
May 13th, 2011 at 6:27 pm

Jawa terminates 60% of the staff per Jason Dupree, seems they are running out of money.

Verizon was granted an injunction Verizon 1 Jawa 0

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