Ripoff Report

What the operator says it does with a report

This page carries the answer nobody in the reputation industry wants to give you, so it is built on the operator's own words rather than anyone's characterization of them. Ripoff Report publishes a legal page, and that page states its position on removal.

"As a matter of policy, Ripoff Report does not redact statements of opinion, nor redact or remove entire postings."

— Ripoff Report, Legal, read 12 August 2026

The operator also states what that policy costs it: "Because Ripoff Report has a long standing general policy against removing Reports in their entirety, Ripoff Report has been sued on many occasions based on the content which our users have created and posted." A business assuming the right letter has not yet been sent should sit with that sentence.

And it states its purpose in the rare cases where it redacts anything: "Ripoff Report's objective in redacting a Report is NOT to erase the posting, but to preserve a record of how a business deals with complaints and with unhappy consumers."

Read that as an operating instruction. The report is treated as a permanent record, and what the operator invites a business to change is not the record but what the record shows the business did next.

The legal page carries no "Updated" date; its footer reads "Copyright © 1997 - 2026." I read it on 12 August 2026. The operator reserves the right to change or deviate from its stated policies, so read the current page yourself before acting on anything here.

What a court order actually buys, and what it does not

There is a court order policy. It is narrower than it sounds, and what it produces is not removal. The operator frames it as discretionary before setting out a single condition: "The following policy will be applied within Ripoff Report's discretion and is not intended to be a promise, contract or agreement."

The stated conditions all have to hold together. The requester submits a court order from a state or federal court in the United States. It is not against the operators of Ripoff Report and it is against the author. It is supported by admissible evidence, including corroborated affidavits under oath, that specifically identified statements of fact in the report are false and defamatory. And Ripoff Report has no reason to believe the order violates the First Amendment.

Meet all of that, and here is the outcome. The operator updates the report's title: "Specific information contained in this report was found to be false and defamatory by a court. Out of respect for the judicial process, the specific information that was found false and defamatory by the court has been redacted." The statements themselves are replaced with a literal string:

(((REDACTED BASED ON FINDINGS VIA COURT ORDER)))

The order is then posted as an attachment to the report, in rare cases ahead of it. The report stays. The URL stays. The rest of the text stays. What litigation bought is a page announcing that a court found something in it false, with the judgment attached and a bracketed string where the worst sentences were.

For some businesses that is a real improvement, and it is worth saying so. It is also not what a vendor means by removal. Whether such an order is obtainable is a question for a defamation attorney.

The judgment the industry sells, and the sentence that refuses it

Now the paragraph that matters most, because it addresses the specific product a large part of the reputation-management industry sells.

"Do not send the Legal Department a copy of a Default Order or Stipulated Order and ask for application of the Court Order Policy. The answer is 'NO' and such requests will be ignored."

— Ripoff Report, Legal, read 12 August 2026 (emphasis the operator's own)

Understand what a default judgment is here. A business sues an anonymous or absent author, who never appears — often because they were never really located, sometimes because they have no idea a case exists. Nobody defends, the court enters judgment because the other side did not show up, and the order recites that the statements are false and defamatory. That document is quick, comparatively cheap, and the standard product of the removal industry. A stipulated order, where an agreeable defendant consents, is the same instrument relabeled.

The operator's stated reason for refusing both is that default and stipulated orders "do not consider evidence." Nobody tested the facts. The order records that nobody disagreed.

So the sequence a business is sold — fund a suit against a Doe defendant, obtain a default judgment, send it in, watch the report disappear — ends at a published sentence saying the request will be ignored. For a business that already holds an order, the operator's alternative is to post it as a Rebuttal, and it notes that this is free.

Why the author's name is harder to get than the pitch suggests

The other route businesses are sold is unmasking. Ripoff Report publishes what it requires, and the standard is demanding. It applies Arizona's test from Mobilisa, Inc. v. Doe, 217 Ariz. 103, 170 P.3d 712 (App. 2007):

"We hold that to obtain a court order compelling discovery of an anonymous internet speaker's identity, the requesting party (i.e., the Plaintiff in an action) must show that: (1) the speaker has been given adequate notice and a reasonable opportunity to respond to the discovery request, (2) the requesting party's cause of action could survive a motion for summary judgment on the elements of the claim not dependent on the identity of the anonymous speaker, and (3) a balance of the parties' competing interests favors disclosure."

— Mobilisa, Inc. v. Doe, quoted on Ripoff Report's legal page, read 12 August 2026

The middle element means the case has to survive summary judgment before the plaintiff learns who the defendant is. The third adds an express balancing of interests, which some states drop. That combination is harder to satisfy than most published advice suggests, and the operator says it is "not in a position to determine which party is telling the truth."

The subpoena requirements add more: personal service on its Arizona statutory agent; issuance from an Arizona court, preferably Maricopa County Superior Court, unless it comes from a federal district court; the specific report numbers and the author's display name; notice to the author, which can mean notice posted on Ripoff Report itself; and a declaration under penalty of perjury saying which statements are false and why. Charges are payable before anything is released: a "$150.00 subpoena processing fee", "$150.00 per hour with a minimum of one (1) hour" for repeat or burdensome subpoenas, and "a minimum payment of $500.00" where vendor records are reached.

Then the quiet killer, which defeats more attempts than the rest: Arizona has a one-year statute of limitations for defamation, A.R.S. § 12-541. It runs from publication, and most businesses find a report months or years after it went up. Whether the window has closed is a question for an attorney, and it is the first one worth asking, because it decides whether the rest of this route exists at all.

The routes that were already tried, at somebody else's expense

Several workarounds have been tried against this operator and decided in published opinions. Knowing them is cheaper than repeating them.

An injunction against the author. In Blockowicz v. Williams, 630 F.3d 563 (7th Cir. 2010), plaintiffs won a default judgment and an injunction ordering the posts removed, then asked the court to enforce it against the website, which was not a party. The Seventh Circuit refused: a non-party is bound only where it aids or abets an enjoined party after the injunction is imposed, and the operator's "mere inactivity" was inadequate. An order aimed at the author does not by itself compel a website that is not a party to take anything down. Some sites honor such orders voluntarily; this one states it does not.

Buying the author's copyright. In Small Justice LLC v. Xcentric Ventures LLC, 873 F.3d 313 (1st Cir. 2017), an attorney obtained a default judgment assigning him the author's copyright, then sued for infringement to force a takedown. The First Circuit held the author had granted the operator an "irrevocable nonexclusive license to display" the posts, so displaying them infringed nothing, and more than $123,000 was awarded to the operator as prevailing party.

Notice to the operator, even from the author. Global Royalties, Ltd. v. Xcentric Ventures, LLC, 544 F. Supp. 2d 929 (D. Ariz. 2008), held that liability based on an author's notice is without statutory support. An author asking for their own post to come down creates no obligation. The operator quotes the wider pattern from Herman v. Xcentric Ventures, LLC: since 1996, every court that has considered the merits of a claim against Ripoff Report has agreed it is immune for what third-party users posted.

What is actually left

Naming what does not work is half an honest page. What remains:

The rebuttal. The operator's stated alternative, and it costs nothing. A rebuttal posts alongside the report without altering it or removing anything. What it does is put a dated, calm, factual account next to the complaint, which is what a reader who scrolled that far is looking for. Written badly — angry, defensive, naming people, threatening anyone — it makes the page worse, and it is permanent too.

The record. Preserve the report as it exists now: the full page, the report number, the display name, the posting date and every rebuttal around it. Where a campaign runs across several sites, the pattern is the thing worth having and it disappears when accounts do.

Everything outside this domain. A report is one page competing with everything else published about your company, and what a search returns is decided elsewhere.

One deliberate omission. The legal page names a Corporate Advocacy Program and VIP Arbitration. I am not going to describe how either works or what either costs, because the operator's own pages describing them could not be verified in this research pass. If I cannot read the operator's description of a program, I cannot tell you what it buys.

What will not work here

The list, plainly, because here the honest answer is the product.

• Paying for deletion. Entire postings are not removed, so anyone charging to delete a report is charging for something the operator says it does not do.
• A default or stipulated judgment. Refused in terms: the answer is no and such requests will be ignored.
• A demand letter to the operator. It has litigated this position for years, and a groundless legal threat used to remove a consumer review is prohibited by 16 CFR § 465.7, in force since 21 October 2024.
• Asking the author to withdraw it, since notice from an author changes nothing, and buying the copyright, which has been tried and decided.
• An injunction against the author. A non-party's inactivity is not contempt.
• A foreign judgment. The operator cites 28 U.S.C. § 4102, which generally bars United States courts from enforcing foreign defamation judgments that conflict with First Amendment protections.

What is left is unglamorous and real: preserve the record, establish with an attorney whether any claim exists and whether the Arizona clock has run, write a rebuttal a reasonable customer would find reassuring, and put the budget you were about to spend on removal into what someone searching for your company finds. That is a worse answer than the one you were promised, and it has the advantage of being the one the operator publishes about itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Published 2026-08-12