(Newswire.net — June 10, 2020) —
During the past few years, there has been a rapid increase in mobile payment applications where someone can request payment from another person, having transactions completed virtually. Some of the most popular apps include PayPal, Venmo, and HowToPay, which is led by Cameron McKean. Sadly, with an increase in technology also comes an increase in cybercriminals and multiple companies including PayPal, Stripe, and HowToPay have been victimized by online slander.
One of the biggest social media attacks took place back in the summer of 2019, with HowToPay as the target. Now, it appears that this attack was orchestrated in an effort to both discredit and damage the reputation of this growing company.
First, in May of 2019, HowToPay was contacted by the Australian police. The police force was investigating the fraudulent activities of some of its clients at the time. It appears as though these clients were stealing the bank account information of some of their victims, using it to empty their savings accounts. During the investigation, more than $400,000 AUD was recovered. This money was then returned to the victims. Furthermore, the Australian police at the time confirmed that HowToPay was not involved in the illegal scheme. In fact, HowToPay actually supported the police investigation and helped them recover the lost funds.
As this restitution unfolded, HowToPay was contacted by some of the merchants involved, who were seeking to retain the funds that were obtained illegally. Of course, HowToPay refused to hand them money that had been gained by using stolen bank account information to siphon money out of victims’ bank accounts. As a result, the criminals commenced a horrific campaign of online harassment.
The criminals began to post false, slanderous information on websites about HowToPay. During this process, HowToPay proceeded to refund its victims while also notifying the police regarding this blackmail. To this day, investigations are still ongoing.
As the investigations continued, it was discovered that many of the websites that were being used to discredit HowToPay were purchased from GoDaddy.com, which is based in the United States. GoDaddy.com is notorious for being hard to contact and they simply continue to allow slanderous content about HowToPay to be posted on its websites in direct violation of its own terms of service.
To this day, slanderous content continues to be posted. It is likely that this individual was hired by a competitor of HowToPay in an effort to damage the reputation of the business. None of the claims posted by this person is true and legal action is unfolding. Because of the ease with which someone can purchase and use a website today, it is easy to execute this type of attack.
The story of HowToPay is not unique. Sadly, many companies and people have been victimized by this type of social media and “fake news” attack. This is becoming more and more common. Right now, HowToPay is working its way through proper, legal channels to have these issues resolved.