One thing that we’ve heard for many years in covering a variety of ridiculous civil and criminal court cases is the belief that when a crazy case is filed, the person accused of wrongdoing should “just walk into court and tell the judge what really happened.” While that might feel right, it’s really not how these things work. There is a procedure, and having an actual lawyer who understands how things work is incredibly valuable.

When we first wrote about “Reckless” Ben Schneider and his valiant attempt to help Bryan Mansell get back the Lego sets (and/or money) he was owed from the company Bricks & Minifigs, we mentioned that almost everyone in the dispute should have talked to lawyers earlier in the process than they did. We had a lot of people get mad at us for making that claim, but I stand by it. Especially after Schneider has dropped Part 3 (after a federal court fixed the extremely problematic injunction from a state court that had blocked him from releasing it originally), and it again shows why Schneider really needs to hire a lawyer.

As lots of people are rightly noting, the video itself shows a ton of pretty sketchy behavior by Bricks & Minifigs and the cops — police walking a witness through how to invent charges while mocking Schneider, and Bricks & Minifigs caught telling wildly different stories depending on who was listening. And then, right on schedule, after the video came out Bricks & Minifigs followed it up with a new blog post on Friday that somehow makes things worse.

Schneider certainly knows how to make pretty viral video content, but representing himself in court seems particularly stupid, especially as he’s doing it here in a criminal case. He is right that the deck is stacked against him and that the prosecutors and the judge don’t seem to be listening to him or taking his claims seriously, but that’s in large part because he’s bumbling into court without a lawyer, and when he’s being asked fundamental procedural questions is telling the judge “have you looked at the evidence we submitted?”

Again, this might feel like the right way to handle a case where you feel you’re being railroaded, but procedurally, the court isn’t supposed to be looking at the evidence at this stage of the case, so Schneider making out like the court is treating him unfairly just misses the point that basically any lawyer could have told him regarding how cases like this proceed.

That’s not to defend the prosecutors, the police, or Bricks & Minifigs. While the video is (again) only showing Schneider’s side of the story, there are a whole bunch of things in the video that are incredibly damning to all three.

Let’s go through a few key points: First up: what the cops told Schneider about the charges against him, and what they were actually hiding.

Schneider plays some audio from one of the criminal cases against him (it’s a little unclear which one, since he suggests it’s the case in American Fork, but a screenshot he shows briefly suggests it may be the other case in Provo), where he says that the prosecutor and the court won’t even share what he’s being charged with, though the video clips don’t show that. Rather they show prosecutors trying to get out of providing body cam footage in discovery to Schneider, claiming that they’re upset he’ll make video commentary out of it. Discovery of evidence is not the same as knowing what the charges are, even if the evidence is related to the charges.

Even so, the claim is bullshit. The fact that Schneider might create public commentary with the videos is no excuse for not providing discovery. If that’s the concern, prosecutors can seek to have a protective order put over how the discovery materials are used, and if Schneider violates that order, then he could face contempt charges. Simply denying discovery is ridiculous.

But it’s the second case, out of Provo, where the bodycam footage stops looking like sloppy policing and starts looking like something much more problematic. Schneider was able to obtain bodycam footage from the police who were handling the charges against him based on statements from Bricks & Minifigs’ CEO Ammon McNeff. Again, we’re only seeing the evidence as selected and edited by Schneider, but it’s difficult to see how there’s anything else that would exonerate how the Provo police acted here.

They literally have one police officer talking to McNeff (repeatedly), talking about how McNeff’s original claim of extortion isn’t supported by the evidence but offering to help him find some other charges, and then asking McNeff to confirm specific elements to turn it into commercial obstruction. The police officer’s quote here is deeply problematic:

“We agree that there really was no extortion code that would fit your situation, however, you know, at the end of the day, we do want to help you guys so you’re not having to deal with this fool… [sigh]… all his issues. We did find that there was another code that fit and it’s called aggravated commercial obstruction….”

Having the police call Schneider a “fool” and saying they want to help find charges that will stick is not great. They then walk McNeff through what they need him to say/do to get such charges, including claiming that he asked Schneider to leave the Bricks & Minifigs premises multiple times and Schneider refused. Schneider shows his own video recordings (and security footage) that appears to directly contradict this — specifically showing that when asked to leave they did so.

There is one point where McNeff asks them to leave but then keeps talking to them anyway, so that almost certainly doesn’t count as a legitimate request to leave. And none of the footage Schneider shares matches even remotely what McNeff told the police. There is footage of Schneider (stupidly) saying “we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” which is not fatal to Schneider’s argument, but can certainly be read as a threat. In all these videos, that’s the one point that isn’t great for Schneider, though in the full context it’s pretty clearly a threat to release more videos and publicly shame Bricks & Minifigs. Still, that line hurts Schneider’s argument a bit.

McNeff also tells the police that Schneider threatened to burn the offices down, even though in their own civil lawsuit against him they admit that various threats have not come from Schneider directly but from some of his fans online. If Schneider had directly threatened them, you’d think they would have included that in the civil complaint. While most of the video evidence has only been selectively released, at this point not a single bit of evidence shows Schneider actually threatening any sort of violence towards Bricks & Minifigs (indeed, it seems that his whole schtick is to sort of do the dopey, hapless, inquisitor thing).

Based on the current evidence, it sure looks like McNeff just lied to the cops, and the cops not only took his side, but helped nudge McNeff about what he should say or do to give them enough to charge Schneider.

Not great!

Even worse, when the same cop figures out what they can charge them with, the body cam footage shows her laughing with glee. You kinda have to watch the clip directly (starting at 16:15) where the cop gets kinda gleeful that McNeff told her enough to charge Schneider with a second degree felony (Schneider falsely calls it a “secondary” felony). This is actually two separate clips from Schneider’s video, though it sounds like they’re directly connected to one another:

Cop: However, the tricky thing is is that we have to prove that this individual either entered or remains unlawfully on the premise. When he came to the property, did you have to ask him more than once to leave?

McNeff: Yes.

Cop: Okay.

McNeff: You know, ‘we’re not leaving until we we get it.’ …

[other video interspersed before cutting back to this exchange]

McNeff (trying to reconstruct the scene for the cop): ‘Guys, at this point, I’ve asked you to leave. Please leave.’ ‘Well, we we you know, like you have to listen to us. You have to pay us this money.’ ‘No, guys, you need to leave and you’re not leaving.’ Like, but I asked multiple times. They did not leave.

Cop: Looks like that might be a second degree felony. [laughs joyfully] He’s facing felony charges. It is a felony…

That is all… pretty damning. Later the same cop mocks Schneider’s first video: “I’m really curious if this fool makes any money doing this YouTube stuff?” Even later, she says to McNeff “well, I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you. Hopefully no more issues” and “there’s so many other things that this guy could be talking about, right?” Just completely supporting McNeff and dismissing Schneider’s side entirely.

Though I will note that Schneider also has a misunderstanding that “reporting a crime” (as he tries to do with McNeff) is “opening a case.” While police can investigate claims of a crime, until a prosecutor charges it, there is no actual “case.”

But it does seem overwhelmingly clear, from what’s presented in this video at least, that the police immediately believed and sided with McNeff and dismissed/ignored everything Schneider presents in response… to the point that they sent a subpoena to Google seeking a bunch of Schneider’s emails, communications, and other documents. There’s a suggestion in the video that McNeff got Schneider to email him just to get his email for the sake of the subpoena, though it seems clear that McNeff had other means of getting Schneider’s email address. Schneider points out that he emailed via the website contact form and had received a reply from someone at Bricks & Minifigs. And while McNeff acts like he’s never heard of that email address and it has nothing to do with him, that’s clearly bullshit, and he could easily talk to whatever employee manages that account to get Schneider’s email address.

Set the criminal case aside for a second, because there’s a parallel thread here that’s just as bad for the company: McNeff’s own claims about the inventory list don’t survive contact with reality. McNeff tells Schneider that he’ll happily share the inventory they did of the store they took over if he sends an email to the one specific address, and says he told Mansell the same thing. However, when Schneider emails that address and follows up, he receives this reply:

If you can’t read that, it says:

Mr. Schneider,

• BAM Franchising, Inc. will not participate in any form of communication that appears designed for public provocation, harassment, or manipulation of facts for the purpose of media content.
• Attempts to obtain privileged or confidential information through misrepresentation or the creation of fraudulent documents may constitute criminal misconduct, and we reserve all rights to refer such behavior to appropriate legal authorities.

Should you believe you are entitled to any specific information under applicable law, we suggest that you pursue such requests through formal and lawful legal procedures.

This will serve as our final response to your inquiry unless we are contacted by duly retained legal counsel representing a party of standing.

That shows pretty clearly that McNeff was full of shit when he said he’d be happy to email Schneider a copy of the inventory. And, sure, you can say that between Schneider visiting them and the time this email was sent they decided that they didn’t like how they were going to be portrayed, but there’s a pattern here. In the video Schneider releases, he shows McNeff saying “I think we have sent it to Bryan” in reference to the inventory list, and later says that if Schneider and Mansell get on an email thread together he’ll send it to both of them.

They also show McNeff going on TV news interviews claiming that they had told Mansell and Mansell’s lawyer that they were happy to work on going through the inventory list, but that Mansell’s lawyer stopped responding. McNeff said: “we’ve tried to share those with Mr. Mansell in hopes that he can see that we were not attempting — in any shape or form — to withhold anything. Those were then offered to him, and the initial offer was rejected.”

Except that Mansell has the receipts in the form of the email thread between his lawyer and Bricks & Minifigs, which seems to show pretty clearly a very different story. Even as we only see snippets of the emails, it’s hard to square this with what McNeff keeps claiming. The emails show Mansell’s lawyer asking multiple times how to get the money owed or the sets back and finally getting a stiff arm email saying that the two guys who Bricks & Minifigs handed the store to, “Brandon Best and Joshua Johnson, have no legal obligation to return any of the LEGO product.”

And then, even more damning is the closing of the email, saying “We consider this matter closed and will not be returning any LEGO products to you.”

That, uh, does not seem like a company that claims that it has no problem trying to work with Mansell to resolve this issue. Last week we mocked Bricks & Minifigs for having their crisis comms person send us an email about how the company was so eager to help make Mansell whole. That already seemed ridiculous since they’re suing Mansell for $1.3 million claiming RICO. But also, that was before we’d seen this email where the company basically says “shove it.”

Anyway, even as this is just coming from Schneider’s side, it’s hard to see how there’s any additional info that would acceptably square the claims made by McNeff with what’s been presented. There’s now plenty of discussion about how Schneider likely has civil claims he could bring against McNeff. Arguably he could also claim that the police in both American Fork and Provo violated his rights, but that’s likely an extreme longshot (not because the cops are in the right, but because it’s next to impossible to sue the cops for violating your rights).

Either way, we now know that Schneider has legal representation for the civil case, and hopefully that means he can also secure legal representation for the criminal case as well, because that would clearly be helpful. Yes, all of this is tremendous content, but your strategy in court when facing felony charges and your strategy for making viral content can (and should) be somewhat different.

Honestly, given how much attention this has gotten, and the legal help that has started to step up, there’s a decent chance that the criminal cases will go away, but that’s very much not the norm. Planning to go viral is not a strategy any lawyer would recommend for fighting criminal charges.

Anyway, while Schneider’s legal troubles play out, it’s worth remembering that Bricks & Minifigs certainly was not blindsided by Schneider’s Part III. They knew it was coming and that it was blocked by the broader injunction they had obtained in court. They knew that they had negotiated a pared back injunction, which meant Part III would be released soon. They basically had weeks to prepare a PR response to all the damning stuff that video was going to show.

And this is what they came up with.

The company released yet another tone deaf blog post on Friday, which talks about all the “changes” they’re making to respond to some of the criticism they’re getting. Half of them basically read as admissions of how badly run the company is. They admit that they’re going to work more closely with franchises (apparently they’ve recently jacked up franchise fees) and have put in place a “standardized inventory and trade system” effectively admitting that they had nothing before.

There are also some comments on the lawsuit that look written by the world’s worst crisis comms team. I mean, this is embarrassing:

Some have asked why Bricks & Minifigs hasn’t simply dropped the pending litigation connected to this matter. The answer is that accountability and integrity must run both ways. We remain open to a mediated, amicable resolution, and we don’t view litigation as the preferred path. We’re also not willing to submit to manipulation, threats and unsupported accusations.

That… doesn’t answer the question. And sure, fine, accountability and integrity should run both ways, but you’re the one out there claiming that you’re trying to make Mansell whole… while telling him you won’t give him any of his stuff back and then suing him for $1.3 million.

The blog post also suggests they have to keep the lawsuit going because Schneider’s conduct “has crossed the line from fair criticism into harassment, misrepresentation, and targeted harm.” But that’s Schneider, not Mansell. It’s also laughable given the footage that’s been shown so far.

And of course they try to avoid the fact that all the presented evidence makes them look terrible with this favorite line:

We will not try this matter on social media, and we will not use this statement to relitigate every disputed detail. Those issues belong in mediation and, if necessary, the legal process.

Again, that makes sense in certain contexts, but here where you’ve been running your mouth off constantly on TV show after TV show with claims that directly contradict what corporate actions and emails have said, it does the opposite of building credibility.

At basically every turn where Bricks & Minifigs could have made the situation better, they’ve dug in and made it worse. It seems like a bad strategy. So bad it’s even worse than going to court and trying to defend yourself from criminal charges without a lawyer.

For years I’ve noted that while Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband system can be very useful for people with no other options (warzones, RVs, boats, rural Americans), the network has struggled to maintain performance as it grows into more mainstream markets, resulting in not only widespread slowdowns, but also the company socking users with massive “congestion surcharges.”

These surcharges are actively designed to deter use because the network is struggling to handle the load. They started at around $100 a few years ago, then jumped to $750. And last week, Reddit users began complaining that they were automatically hit with a $1500 demand surcharge. And because Musk’s companies historically don’t invest in customer service, calling up to complain doesn’t really help:

“I have been charged 1500 dollars demand surcharge for simply verifying my address that I have subscribe to 3 years ago. I have contacted starlink customer support but it’s pretty worthless. I have been getting tossed from one agent to another agent for the past 5 days.”

Last year, a study from researchers at X-Lab quietly showed that Starlink struggles to manage the load as the network grows, making it ill-suited as serious game changer for U.S. access. So as the network scales up, Starlink will be forced to impose more and more limits and restrictions on usage to ensure that most people have an acceptable experience. The laws of physics are kind of annoying like that.

That a niche broadband option gets congestion normally wouldn’t be that big of a deal; the problem is Trump Republicans have hijacked and retooled the $42.5 billion infrastructure bill broadband grant program to throw billions of dollars — and millions of new customers — at Musk’s Starlink as a personal favor to one of the U.S. president’s biggest donors.

Ideally, sensible U.S. broadband policy involves pushing fiber optic cable as deeply into American communities as possible, then covering a lot of the remainder with either fixed wireless or cellular tech. Only then can low-Earth orbit satellite broadband options like Starlink (or Amazon’s Leo) act as niche options that fill in the gaps.

These technologies were never really designed to be the primary avenue for broadband delivery across the bandwidth-hungry country. They’re simply not useful in many more densely populated areas. But the Trump extended infotainment universe is convinced that Starlink is akin to some kind of magic simply because Musk’s name is involved.

So they’re redirecting billions of taxpayer dollars away from better, higher-capacity fiber options and toward Musk’s Starlink, which is only going to result in greater congestion as the network begins to strain under the heavily subsidized load. People will only start to figure this out long after Musk has pocketed billions of dollars in subsidies in exchange for Starlink service SpaceX already planned to deploy.

I’ll repeat that because it gets missed: Musk is getting billions in subsidies, which he professes to hate, in exchange for doing nothing differently. Extremely innovative.

There’s been an additional layer of stupidity created by the SpaceX IPO and its utterly bogus proclaimed valuations. The prospectus pretends that Starlink will somehow magically scale from 10 million current subscribers to more than 300 million in very short order with no headaches, but reality and the laws of physics are going to have something very different in mind.

And again (just like Tesla Solar), because Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent, folks shoveled toward Starlink by the Trump administration aren’t going to have a good time. This is all before you get to the fact that Starlink has also been criticized for harming astronomical research and the ozone layer, and is generally too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access.

That’s not to say that services like Starlink don’t have very real uses, but the company and its tech (like everything Musk touches) is being wildly misrepresented in a way that’s going to become increasingly and problematically apparent in the next few years.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Bloof with a comment about Wikipedia banning its co-founder:

Guy was one of many people involved in the start of Wikipedia, left in a snit to start rival project after rival project more in line with his personal vision, each dying a death because his vision doesn’t make for a useful website with a thriving community. After these sites rotted on the vine, he decided to do return, contribute nothing worthwhile for years and right wing media tours to help signal boost right wing attempts to attack the site because they won’t let them hijack the site the way they have everything else.

He’s the intellectual equivalent of a J6er, he openly tried to do a coup, got punished because the rules should be applied equally regardless of political beliefs, and expects sympathy, only there’s no Trump to wave the get out of consequences free card for him.

In second place, it’s That One Guy with a simple response to ICE rebutting Nazi allegations by going full Gestapo:

Someone doth protest too much

If not nazi, why nazi shaped?

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Whoever about how speech laws designed to protect the powerless get abused by the powerful:

Another example

In the UK, the wealthy and powerful are able to get “Superinjunctions” to prevent speech, and, significantly, even the existence of the injunction cannot be disclosed.

Combined with strict libel laws (even truth is not an absolute case in the UK — the case of George Galloway against the Daily Telegraph showed this), the powerful in the UK can be used to restrict speech that criticizes them.

Next, it’s Stephen T. Stone with a comment about the FCC claiming the First Amendment allows it to ban porn:

Porn is, was, and always will be the canary in the censorship coal mine. Censors count on people being too embarassed about defending porn to stop censorship. If they take even the most innocuous pornography away from you⁠—I’m talking Playboy pinups here⁠—and you do nothing about it because “who wants to defend smut”, every other kind of speech is on the table. This really is a “first they came for” situation, so if you’re not willing to openly defend porn as protected speech, the least you can do is not openly support the censors when they use your triggers against you.

“Remember, pornographers have always been on our side. Brave, ready to fight for our rights. Smut is our friend.” — John Waters

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Bloof with a comment about Trump taking out his anger over the reflecting pool on a US olympic canoeist:

If he’s mad about the Olympian, wait until he hears about that idiot who drove a motorcade of heavy, armoured vehicles across it before they filled it back up. That guy will be in sooo much trouble.

In second place, it’s Zeus with another joke about the whole debacle:

LMFAO

A narcissist obsessed with a reflecting pool?

Not again. Sheesh.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment about time travel:

You don’t reseaerch time travel: you just make a decision to research time travel and if your future self doesn’t promptly show up to say hi then you know that your research would have failed.

Finally, it’s MrWilson responding to the FCC General Counsel’s complaint about porn being widely available and cheap or free:

Well something needs to be affordable in our society if it’s not going to be food, housing, education, energy, and other basic human needs.

That’s all for this week, folks!

This Week in 2016

• ‘Most Transparent’ President Signs Into Law FOIA Reform Bill That Won’t Affect His Administration
• Documentary About Freeing Happy Birthday From Copyfraud Comes Out The Day After Happy Birthday Officially Declared Public Domain
• Why The Latest Supreme Court Ruling In Kirtsaeng May Have A Much Bigger Impact On Copyright & Fair Use
• Appeals Court Says That Sharing Passwords Can Violate Criminal Anti-Hacking Laws
• FBI Vacuums Up Local Law Enforcement Documents To Block Open Records Requests About Orlando Shooting
• Facebook Experiments With End To End Encryption In Messenger

This Week in 2011

• Smear Campaign Ramps Up Against Those Who Believe Free Speech Is More Important Than Hollywood’s Obsolete Business Model
• Homeland Security Working Hard To Make Sure No One Wants To Use .com Or .net Domains
• Video Gamers Realizing Streaming Criminalization Bill Might Make A Lot Of Them Into Criminals
• Senator Jerry Moran Removes Himself As A PROTECT IP Co-Sponsor
• RIAA Accounting: How To Sell 1 Million Albums And Still Owe $500,000
• Did The Entertainment Industry Backdoor In Forcing ISPs To Kick People Offline, While Claiming It Did Not?

This Week in 2006

• Throwing Away Privacy In The Blink Of An Eye
• New Casino Business Model: Any Time Someone Wins, Blame The Software
• Australia Wants To Regulate YouTube As Well
• Attention English Teachers: Google Is Officially A Verb
• Will The MPAA Now Lobby For A Ban On The Print Screen Button?
• Is The Navy Trying To Patent The Firewall?

The long-rumored layoffs at Xbox have come and they are massive. We just recently discussed the mess that Microsoft’s Xbox division has become. An internal email that was sent to staff by CEO Asha Sharma laid out just how bad things were, essentially preparing the staff for the forthcoming staffing cuts. Interestingly, this is the latest in a series of staff cuts, many of which have been at studios that Microsoft recently acquired and told the FTC and the courts that there wouldn’t be layoffs in order to get the acquisitions approved. Those were lies, of course, but there won’t be any punishment for those lies. Regulation is just so un-American, you know.

This round of layoffs will effect over 3,000 staff members eventually, or about a fifth of the Xbox division workforce. The appetizer this past week accounts for about half that number. Working at Xbox right now must be buckets of fun, where you get to try to perform quality work while wondering if your name is on some list somewhere. An email went around again acknowledging the layoffs, as well as several Xbox studios going independent.

This email, shared with Kotaku, says that 1,600 of those layoffs will take place today, while the rest will take place later. Compulsion Games and Double Fine will become independent studios, while Ninja Theory and Undead Labs “have entered terms to join new ownership with funding to complete and grow Senua and State of Decay 3,” though the specifics of that have not yet been disclosed. Arkane Lyon is entering legally required “consultation” in France to review its options, and its fate remains unclear.

Layoffs will also take place in varying sizes across Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and Xbox Game Studios, though Sharma stated that none of Xbox’s first-party, publicly announced games or projects are being canceled as a part of these cuts. Mojang and King will now report directly to Sharma.

Again, several of these studios experiencing layoffs were recently acquired by Microsoft and, during regulatory proceedings, Microsoft said that layoffs wouldn’t occur. And, again, there will be no consequences for these lies, other than those felt by these ex-employees who no longer have a job.

Interestingly, these layoffs came along with a message that Xbox was going to start getting real lean on where it focuses its staff and money investments, primarily into “core franchises” in the gaming space. Despite that message, we’re already hearing about how these layoffs will result in the delay of current production of games in those very core franchises.

Speaking on condition of anonymity to protect their careers, current and former staff have told me that job losses across Bethesda Game Studios locations have removed more than 50 employees, including “key, high-performing people in the trenches” building the company’s long-awaited Skyrim successor. This in turn, they say, has shattered morale, raised the risk of future development crunch, and increased the likelihood that the game’s already far-off completion date will be delayed.

If you’re interested in how Xbox management is behaving in the midst of all of this turmoil and the obviously negative emotions of the remaining employees, well, it’s been awfully fucking shitty, honestly. Several Bethesda offices saw employees setting up “Celebrations of Service” in common areas, where staff members put up pictures of and messages to ex-coworkers to show their appreciation for all they’d done. That same day Xbox HR ordered that those memorials be taken down, all under the bullshit excuse that you can’t do that sort of thing in a common area.

“Unfortunately, HR made our office manager take this down almost immediately,” posted the union account. “They said because it’s in a common area, it had to be removed. We’ve used common areas for many things as a team, including fan works, but HR seems to believe that a Celebration of Service is inappropriate.”

And, since you can’t have real American capitalism in the modern era without getting a heavy dose of irony to go along with it, Asha Sharma herself was recently named to a task for at the Federal Reserve to advise on “jobs and productivity.” This is a bit like the FDA putting Hannibal Lecter on its advisory panel for a proper nutritional diet.

“The Federal Reserve’s commitment to price stability and maximum employment is unwavering. As is our resolve to pursue our mandate with rigor,” Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh said in a press release on July 9. “The U.S. economy has changed significantly over the last generation, and never more so than right now. Each task force will carefully consider whether policymakers’ means and methods, analytical tools and policy approaches can be improved upon. I am honored that the best minds from a range of disciplines have agreed to work with us to sharpen our performance as an institution. The goal is straightforward: to ensure the Fed is best positioned to achieve our objectives in this consequential time.”

Maximum employment? What an interesting concept for someone who just instituted historic layoffs to advise on.

So, how are things going at Xbox? Pretty fucking horrible. Layoffs, tone-deaf executives, delayed games, poor morale, and a workforce living in fear that they might be next. And I just can’t help but to return the point that much of this is a result of overextending acquisitions of enormous developers and publishers in the last five years, during which the company promised this very thing would not happen.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

Last month, my colleagues and I published an investigation into a Texas oil refinery startup, America First Refining, that had secretly gotten investment from Donald Trump Jr. We discovered a saga involving the Trump administration’s tariff policy, sanctioned Russian oil and an Indian billionaire family’s private zoo. 

At the center of the story was the CEO of the refinery company, Texas businessman John Calce. We’d spent weeks examining Calce — pulling old lawsuits, property records, corporate registry filings — and had pieced together a portrait of what appeared to be an obscure serial entrepreneur who’d for years tried and failed to secure funding for his long-shot refinery project.

Then, not long before our story was set to publish, we decided to do a scrub on a separate company he had incorporated called Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals.

Pulling up the company’s website, I felt a brief flash of panic: Had we somehow missed the existence of a major business owned by the man at the center of our next story? 

“From Houston to Rotterdam, Jurong to Fujairah. Our network connects the world’s most vital energy markets with speed, safety, and precision bulk oil storage,” announced the front page of the company’s website.

Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals, per the website, had more than 850 employees and 28 million barrels of oil storage capacity across six global hubs. This was puzzling: Our reporting had led us to believe Calce was struggling to raise enough money for a single project in the U.S., not overseeing a massive, multinational oil storage corporation. 

Had we been wrong? 

We turned to Google to learn more about the company’s top executives. Its CEO, Sarah Jenkins, had more than 20 years of experience at major energy firms. And its chief technology officer, David Chen, “built the company’s proprietary inventory management portal and integrated AI-driven predictive maintenance systems,” according to his bio. But we couldn’t find any trace of either of them online. Chalk it up to common names? 

We then Googled one of the more distinct names: Vice President for Sustainability Dr. Sofia Rossi, who had “spearheaded the ‘Future Fuels’ program, preparing assets for biofuels and hydrogen.” But, again, nothing. The links to their LinkedIn profiles were dead.

When we searched the company’s Texas phone numbers, we found the same numbers listed online for a Houston baklava caterer, a Dallas-area taxi service and an OB-GYN office.

We called the Texas numbers: dead. Then we tried the numbers for the company’s facilities in the Netherlands, Singapore and China. Also dead. 

We were beginning to suspect this company did not actually exist, at least as described on its website. 

What was going on with this website? We looked at the source code and noticed an odd notation, “This feature isn’t implemented yet, but don’t worry! You can request it in your next prompt!”

We checked the site’s domain registration, and we had our (apparent) answer: It was created this year and traced back to a company called Hostinger that offers an AI website builder for $2.99 per month. “Describe it, and AI builds it,” its homepage says. “Appear on Google and AI search automatically.”

Indeed, Google’s “AI Overview” search response, now thrust on users by default with more and more regularity, seemed to ratify the company’s bona fides:

When I searched for an award the company claimed on its website to have won, the Google AI Overview said that “Recent notable recipients include Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals, recognized for their rapid expansion in the independent oil and terminal operations sector.”

Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals is a real LLC. But everything on its website — from its history of the company, to its job postings, a diversity and inclusion policy — appears to be fictional. But perhaps more troubling is that Google, the proprietor of the world’s primary research tool, has rolled out AI Overviews that can indiscriminately take in fake material and authoritatively spit it back out as real.

In response to questions, a Google spokesperson said in a statement: “AI Overviews are rooted in our core Search ranking systems, surfacing reliable and high-quality information for the vast majority of queries. For uncommon search terms like these, there might not be high quality information published that matches the query — and we use these examples to improve our search systems.”

After we reached out to Hostinger, the company pulled down the site. “After receiving your inquiry, we carried out an internal review. Based on the violations identified, we suspended the website and the account behind it in line with our Terms of Service,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

What we encountered is a particular species of a larger problem that is beginning to be better understood. In April, The New York Times reported on an analysis that found Google’s AI Overviews were accurate approximately 9 out of 10 times, noting that that added up to “tens of millions of erroneous answers every hour” given vast search volumes. (A Google spokesperson told the Times that the study has “serious holes.” The company has acknowledged that AI Overviews “can make mistakes.”) 

A BBC reporter wrote a fictional article naming himself the best tech journalist at eating hot dogs, and Google’s AI as well as ChatGPT quickly picked it up and parroted it back.  

And the source material for the AI Overviews also appears eminently gameable, even when not trafficking in actual fiction. “It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests,” ran a recent headline in 404 Media. 

The mystery website ended up as just a single paragraph in our story. But the larger implication is obvious: fakes, counterfeits and frauds that would have taken considerable effort to create just a few years ago can now be churned out pretty much instantly.

While preparing this piece, we reached out to Calce asking about the site. An attorney for his company, America First Refining, replied to us with a letter dated June 24 that the attorney sent to Hostinger. The attorney also addressed the letter to several email addresses listed on the Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals website.  

“I write to demand immediate removal from the brownsvilleenergyterminals.com website of all unauthorized references to America First’s office address on your website,” the letter said. “As you are aware, America First has no connection or affiliation with the brownsvilleenergyterminals.com website and has not authorized the use of its corporate address there.”

I’m left with lingering questions about the website: What was it for? Was it put up by some malicious actor who simply found the company’s LLC records and decided to create a website? Was it a test site that was mistakenly put online? Or could it have been designed for consumption by someone who was meant to think it was real? 

We don’t know, and our emails to the press contact listed on the website, media@brownsvilleenergyterminals.com, bounced back.