London 10/03/2012 | There was a time when Venezuelan thugs caught in the act resorted to a form of intimidation that lacked solid ground: paid advertising in regime-aligned media without any clear definition. I fondly remember how a couple of small-time crooks from a polling company called ‘North American Opinion Research’, Julio Makarem and Ricardo Valbuena, decided that the best way to tackle the publication of their questionable history was to appeal to Hugo Chávez and the authorities of his regime to open an investigation against me and other bloggers who had contributed to inquiries about their dubious affairs or echoed our findings. It goes without saying that, unfortunately for Makarem and Valbuena, no investigation was initiated, leaving their reputations shattered forever.
However, time has brought changes in the methods used by both old and new criminals in Venezuela. Perhaps readers remember how imitators, acting on behalf of Majed Khalil Majzoub, began to harass me and send legal threats demanding that I remove perfectly valid information about the corruption business Khalil Majzoub was involved in Venezuela. Since my reaction wasn’t what Khalil Majzoub had in mind, his online reputation management team contacted Blogger.com to claim that my posts exposing his illegal activities violated copyright. After some time, Blogger recognized the validity of my counterarguments—after all, I doubt Google is in the business of protecting the reputation of criminals—and restored the contested posts.
Just before Blogger had “ruled” in my favor, my hosting company sent the following message:
Please note that there is an ongoing Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on your website, vcrisis.com.
Since this attack was affecting the entire shared server, we have implemented a firewall block to restrict access to vcrisis.com only. Your email and other services should continue to function.
We are monitoring the DDoS attack and will lift the firewall block once it subsides.
If you are aware of the attack’s source or reason, please inform us of any information.
This was the first time, since I started blogging on vcrisis.com in October 2002, that such an attack occurred. I had received all sorts of threats, but my site had never been subjected to a DDoS attack. The attack lasted for about a week. Through my own investigations, I was able to determine that money—erm, millions in public funds stolen from Venezuela—can buy the services of hackers, including botnets to conduct massive DDoS attacks.
While my personal story with Majed Khalil Majzoub unfolded, similar attempts were happening elsewhere. I realized that those working to clean Khalil Majzoub’s online reputation had registered hundreds of websites, effectively lowering the Google ranking of exposés, causing them to be hidden from the first page when someone searches for his name. That’s fine, it’s legal and many people do it. Due to the open-source nature of the published information, the legal threats I received achieved nothing. However, while reading other sites, I learned that other boliburgueses, a term used for the class of corrupt chavista ‘entrepreneurs’ who have gotten incredibly wealthy in recent years, were in on it too. David Osio and Moris Beracha—both linked to the $550 million fraud by Pancho Illaramendi against PDVSA workers’ funds—have been registering hundreds of websites to erase connections to articles that expose them as criminals. In the comments section of the previously linked article, FTI Consulting is mentioned as the company ‘cleaning up’ these thugs’ images online.
Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López, aka Alejandro Betancourt López. This guy is set to become the director of a company called Smartmatic, boasting about his willingness to undergo a CFIUS investigation, only to realize it wasn’t the best move for them and ended up fleeing.
Derwick Associates is a prime example of a cast of criminal enterprises that have flourished under Hugo Chávez’s rampant and irresponsible waste. From Ricardo Fernández Barrueco, to Wilmer Ruperti, Smartmatic boys, the Khalil brothers, ‘bankers’ David Osio and Moris Beracha, to drug trafficker Walid Makled—who had high-ranking Venezuelan generals and chavista politicians on his payroll—all share the same characteristics: an amoral and looting nature that has cost Venezuela billions of dollars over the past 14 years.