Sleuths & Scammers, Part 2

To Catch a Yelp Reviewer

This is Part 2 of a 2-part series with crime writer Jake Flanagin. In this subscriber special, we dive a little deeper into the Case of the One-Star Yelp Review. You can read Part 1, which covers sleuthing hacks, lizard cults, and more, here.

CW: mentions of child abuse, kidnapping, assault, stalking.

Any good detective story blurs the lines between intuition and paranoia. The internet often feels the same way— boundless data drifting around the digital ether, requiring scrollers to discern wheat from chafe, information from misinformation, narrative from chaos. And so, behold, a crisis of witness: while Googling orgs for a clothing donation drop, I stumbled across the most singularly insane Yelp review I’ve ever seen.

via Yelp

Yelp has always been a self-selecting creative writing workshop for insane and inane consumerist commentary, but the sheer strangeness of Don A.’s accusations—the severity, the time frame, the inclusion of minor celebrity name-dropping—was special to me. Some light clicking revealed that Don A. has authored several pages of one-star reviews. He gives a vetrinarian a one-star review for killing his dog. He gives a Northridge Jersey Mike’s sandwich franchise a one-star review for not letting him enter with a (presumably) different dog. He gives one-star reviews to hospitals, community centers, and legal offices. He gives a Mid-City Topshop four stars, because the mannequins are skinny. His favorite insults to leverage against businesses are that they are “rude” or “greedy.” Don A.’s tone is that of the litigious sociopath, both condescending and self-victimizing; whenever he can, he calls employees out by first and last name, toeing the line of Yelp’s privacy policies and acting, in this amateur web sleuth’s opinion, extremely Karen-y. He makes a point to include details such as a company’s profit margin or other financial information in his reviews, suggesting that before heading to Yelp, he engages in extensive revenge research. Don A. seems like a real bag of dicks.

Of course, bags of dicks get pistol-whipped, too. Yelp’s content guidelines prohibit “rants about political ideologies, a business’s employment practices, extraordinary circumstances, or other matters that don’t address the core of the consumer experience,” as well as harassment and conflicts of interest (specifically, “You shouldn’t write reviews of... competitors in your industry.”) At first glance, Don A. seems to be in violation of several of these policies, but the review has been up for over five years— indicating that while it’s insane, it may not be slander.

For a few weeks, I’ve hovered somewhere between fascinated and deeply depressed by Don A. A year into quarantine, however, between content creation and Vanderpump Rules reruns, I figure it won’t hurt to dig a little deeper. So, I turned to my crime writer friend Jake to help me determine what exactly the fuck the deal is with Don A. Predictably, things got weirder. Below is a transcript our conversation as we investigate together.

AA: So within like two minutes of initially sending you this review, you worked your magic and found an L.A. Times article from 1991. The article states that these children’s charity heads are in a feud, counter-suing each other, allegedly attacking one another—these are actual events that have been happening? Apparently for decades?

JF: Yep.

AA: It seems sort of like two horrible sociopaths are running children's charities in the greater Los Angeles area: Children of the Night, run by Lois Lee, and Thursday’s Child, run by Don A.

JF: I just want to note that Children of the Night is open from 9:00 AM to 9:00 AM.

AA: They are available. I haven’t looked into Lois Lee very much at all—you also sent me this website a devoted to calling her a “trollop,” which feels very Joe Exotic/Carole Baskin to me. I got sidetracked by Don A. So: Don A. has a Twitter, and he's into QAnon. No photos of him online, which feels intentional. One uh, interesting thing is that the Los Angeles Times story notes that Don A. is a one-man operation for runaway teens. Like, it's just him in his house.

JF: I do not like that.

AA:  Yep. Don't like that. I think he’s gotten in trouble for like, writing off like all of his utilities— shit like that, where I'm like, okay… so at best, this is like a weird tax thing. The thing that really got me though, that deepened the mystery, is— if you go to the Thursday's Child website, it's like… fantastically bad.

JF: Oh Jesus.

AA:  It's like this stock image—a super blonde, blue-eyed girl, like what you see on all those Save the Children billboards—and then it has all these Satanic Panic words, like "peer pressure" and "sexting."

JF:  This looks like the cover of a Stephen King novel.

AA: Totally. You can also play the embedded song, which is really chaotic, if you would like. But then— if you go to the dropdown menu, there's a "Contact us." And if you go to "Contact us," there's a section that says, "Learn about an email Peyton." And if you click that...

JF:  "Who the hell am I?" Oh, Jesus. No.

AA: We get this page, with these two girls. One is the “spokesmodel,” Peyton. It's a Q&A with her, and you can hover over the question for her answers. I'm not a PI, but I am a millennial girl, and they're definitely written by an old guy. No zoomer writes this way.

JF: While we're together here, I'm gonna screenshot Peyton's face from the home page, and we're going to see, using PimEyes, if Peyton is really named Peyton.

AA: Hell yeah.

JF: Cause I have a feeling that she is not. Let's see... Okay.... Got it. She definitely has a lot of photos. Let me open the first one that does not say "potentially explicit…" Yeah, this is a stock photo. It's not her.

AA: Fake teen. Cool cool cool.

JF:  Yeah, these are royalty free images.

AA: Okay, so this dude is using a royalty free image of some girls. Also, okay, there are two of them—which is weird, I’m like, why would you make this choice? Peyton's “story” is like, "I have a twin. She's gay and I'm not." There's a whole fanfic narrative around this. And I'm like, why wouldn't you just choose a stock photo with one model? Why would you make up a plotline about a twin? It's like the "shipyard" plotline in Cats (2019), like, it still doesn't make sense, why would you add it in?

JF: This is very strange.

AA: One of the Q&A questions is, "Am I going to date you?" This is just so pervy to me! And now this is one of those things where I'm examining my own interest in going down the rabbit hole of Don A. in the first place. My initial feeling was, what the fuck, this is so weird. But now, the more real this "investigation" gets, the more I'm a little bit like, fuck. Like, if he is a charity, I'm not really concerned with someone scamming taxes, but I am concerned that there are like, potential vulnerable human beings who are exposed to this person when they're looking for an organization to help them. I mean, maybe he doesn't even do that. Maybe he doesn't "rescue" anyone and he just lives out this internet lie, but... this thing is really weird.

JF: Did you see the fake interview he created? Hang on. I'm going to send this to you. This is like, hidden somewhere on the website.

AA: Different from the Q&A?… Oh, this is so much weirder! God, this website is also really chaotically designed. "A candid conversation." So these are stock images. Like to be clear—this is an interview that this adult man wrote in the voice of stock images.

JF: Yeah. I've been trying to find out the identity of this model. I think she's European. Everything she's published on is like a stock image site. I saw one photo of her that looked like a casual, non-professional shot; it looked like they were on a street somewhere in like the Netherlands or Denmark or something.

AA: When you're searching for photos like that, should you try and get a screenshot as close to the face as possible, or a clear head-on shot?

JF: PimEyes is pretty good about matching profiles up with head-on shots. Especially in this case where this woman has a very fruitful stock modeling career. Also, she's not a teen, she's very well into her twenties.

AA: I guess that’s a blessing.

JF: Definitely. She was fairly easy to find and would probably be easy to find even with not super clear photos, just given the sheer amount of content that's out there about her.

AA: This entire article is... a lot. The details are a little bit different from the Q&A, but both of them feel really skeevy. Again, what a blessing that this person is actually an adult, living her happy stock model career and completely unaware of Don A. But just like, yeah, I don't know. This is kind of fucked up.

JF: No, totally. And that was my first impression— that this is two really unbalanced people colliding in a really toxic and creepy way.

AA: Do you ever hit a line, when doing this? Like when the ethics start to feel weird, or when it starts to feel kind of bad. When you sort of start to feel like you're looking a little bit too close at the car crash or whatever, or you're at someone else's candle vigil, you know?

JF: I mean, I'm sort of feeling it now, just looking at the stuff and reading about what this guy writes. There does come a point where you think, okay, this person just seems not well and kind of lonely. I'm not qualifying what you're doing whatsoever, every story to some extent draws up these feelings, so don't take this as, stop doing what you're doing. But if you're an empathetic person, you definitely think, am I doing anyone a service by getting into this? Or should I just let this guy continue doing this probably ultimately harmless, if a little bit creepy, thing? Hopefully harmless. Also, grim, but also a little comforting— I searched Don’s name on the CA Sex Offender registry and there doesn’t appear to be a match.

AA: That actually does make me feel better, thank you! Yeah, for me, I'll say that I think this is sort of fascinating, and also this for me might be the point where I'm like, hmm, I'm going to tap out on this one, you know? Maybe I don't have the same drive as someone else. I do think that it's kinda compelling that there's this 40-year long public feud between two fucking insane charity heads. Fascinating interpersonal drama; interpersonal drama that seems generally accepted, in that they both allegedly still have careers doing this and are like, getting charitable donations. You could probably look into records and confirm that. That's an interesting story. But at this point, I think I would rather devote my time to whether someone's being Tinder catfished, or some other low-stakes mystery. The stakes here seem… gross to me. And I appreciate you saying, "Who does this actually help?" Like, what's the point?

JF: It is fascinating, and that's the thing— you do have to walk that line between what is personally fascinating versus what serves a public function. I’ve always tried to stay away from the kind of crime and scandal writing that you see in places like People Magazine, where it's like, "We need fifty more stories about Jodi Arias," who's just a psychopath and no additional excavating of her life or the details around what she did is going to change anything, or illuminate anything, or make anyone a better person. I'm not comparing that at all to what you did here, but I think it's always going to be at the forefront of any crime writer of quality's mind. It's a very fine line between exploitation and telling stories that are important and helpful to people, you know?

After Jake and I got off the phone, I debated about whether I wanted to write about Don A. at all. Ultimately, I decided to put this on private a) so he wouldn’t find it and write me a one-star review; b) because there isn’t really a lot of narrative closure here, and it’s probably not worthy of a full public exploration with the time and resources available to me; and c) because as someone whose curiosity often slips into nosiness, I feel like there’s some pedagogic function to the case of Don A. One of the most exciting parts of the internet is its capacity for us to explore—to find new communities, niche interests, and spaces that feel almost entirely your own. Like all potential colonists, however, it’s worth noting that no territory is truly new. We’re just stepping onto someone else’s land. If you have thoughts on Yelp, Satanic Panic, or the children’s charity wars, I’d love to hear them. Otherwise, I’m letting this case go cold.