#burbank

Literally two blocks away.

I'm gonna be at this art market in Burbank on Saturday!

I'll have a lot of the recent cards and stickers and prints for sale. I'm gonna try to do a small online sale next month too, but that'll be the last chance to buy stuff until summer conventions like AX and Anime NYC.

So there's a great Thai restaurant in my neighborhood called Kiin. Yesterday, I searched for their website to order some takeout. Here's the Google result.

That top result (an ad)? It's fake. It goes to https://kiinthaila.com, which is NOT the website for Kiin.

The *third* result is real: https://kiinthaiburbank.com

Fake site:

Real site:

I got duped. I placed an order with the fake site. The fake site then placed the order - in my name! -  with the real site, having marked up the prices by 15%. Kiin clearly knows they're doing this (presumably by the billing data on the credit card the fakesters use to place the order). They called me within minutes to tell me they'd cancelled the fakesters' order.

I could still come pick it up, but I'd have to pay them, and cancel the payment to the fakesters with Amex. Actually, as it turns out, I have to cancel TWO payments, because the fakesters DOUBLE-charged me.

Here's what that charge looks like on my Amex bill. See that phone number? (415) 639-9034 is the number for Wix, who provides the scammers' website.

How the actual FUCK did these obvious scammers get an Amex merchant account in the name of "KIINTHAILA" by after supplying the phone number for a website hosting company? What is Amex's KYC procedure? Do they even call the phone number?

And why the actual FUCK is Google Ads accepting these scam artists' ads for a business that they already have a knowledge box for?! Google KNOWS what the real KIIN restaurant is, and yet they are accepting payment to put a fake KIIN listing two slots ABOVE the real one.

To be fair to these scammer asshole ripoff creeps who are trying to steal from my local mom-and-pop, single location Thai eatery, they're just following in the shoes of Doordash and Uber Eats, who did the same thing to hundreds (thousands?) of restaurants during lockdown.

Doug Rushkoff says that the ethic of today's "entrepreneur" is to “Go Meta” - don't provide a product or a service, simply find a way to be a predatory squatter on a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who use those things.

These parasites have turned themselves into landlords of someone else's home, collecting rent on a property they don't own and have no connection to.

There's NEVER just one ant. I guaran-fucking-tee you that these same creeps have 1,000 other fake Wix websites with 1,000 fake Amex merchant accounts for 1,000 REAL businesses, and that Google has sold them ads for every one of them. Amex and Google and Wix should be able to spot these creeps FROM ORBIT. Holy shit do we live in the worst of all possible timelines. We have these monopolist megacorps that spy on and control everything we do, wielding the most arbitrary and high-handed authority.

And yet they do NOT ONE FUCKING THING to prevent these petty scammers from using their infra as force-multipliers to let them steal from every hungry person patronizing every local restaurant.

I mean, what's the point of letting these robber-barons run the entire show if they're not even COMPETENT?