Who Has the Last Word in Consumer Debate?

By John Kelly
Thursday, May 3, 2007

In March, I wrote about a local home improvement contractor who was suing two of his customers for posting negative comments online about his work.

"Awful" is how Mount Pleasant's Monica Hammock described her experience with SCS Contracting Group of Burtonsville.

"Libel" is how SCS's owner, Stephen C. Sieber, described the comments Hammock and others posted on Angie's List, a consumer Web site.

Now Sieber has a bigger target. In April, the contractor withdrew the libel lawsuits against his customers and filed a suit against Angie's List, charging it with tortious interference and fraud.

You can read the lawsuit yourself at http://www.angiegotsued.com, a site Sieber put up. Basically, Sieber's argument is that Angie's List trumped up the accusations against his company as a way of luring new customers.

Angie's List members pay about $60 a year to be able to search reviews of various service providers and post comments on their own consumer experiences. The for-profit company has about 500,000 members across the country.

Sieber is especially incensed about a "Consumer Alert" Angie's List e-mailed in February, warning that several of its members had complained about SCS and said they were harassed by Sieber. The alert found its way onto various neighborhood message groups.

The alert, Sieber wrote in his lawsuit, "was used solely as a public relations ploy to gain more market exposure and revenue for Defendants, at the expense of the business and reputation of SCS Contracting Group and Stephen C. Sieber personally."

In an interview, Sieber told me: "I'm standing up for all the service providers who this will not happen to, ever."

Angie Hicks, the founder of Indianapolis-based Angie's List, said: "The First Amendment is a powerful thing. We strongly believe that we are on solid legal footing in this situation, and we're going to vigorously defend ourselves against this suit."

This could turn into a massive case of he said/they said. Meanwhile, I'm left with a few observations:

· Entrepreneurs have realized that time-starved consumers are hungry for information. After my column ran, I heard from the people behind http://www.servicemagic.com, http://www.urbanreferrals.com, http://www.rustreviews.com and http://www.yellowpages.com, all of which offer some sort of online rating or referral service.

· Consumers can't rely solely on sites such as these when picking a contractor. A reader complained that even contractors that get A ratings on Angie's List aren't necessarily licensed (a gripe of Sieber's as well). Hicks told me that licensing is a complicated matter and Angie's List can't be up to date with every contractor's specifics. Instead, she's working to provide links from Angie's List to the appropriate authority so consumers can do their own checking.

· These sites are themselves businesses, and they make their money in different ways. Several contractors complained that they were vigorously solicited by Angie's List salespeople to advertise on the site. Hicks said businesses that receive an A or B rating are invited to provide money-saving coupons for members, garnering a higher position on the site's search page. There is a fee for that. "If a company falls [below a B], the right to run the coupon is revoked," she said.

About a half-dozen of Sieber's ex-customers have come together as a sort of victims support group, meeting to compare notes on their experiences and urging local officials to take action against the contractor.

Bennett Rushkoff of the District's Office of the Attorney General said the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs "has received complaints from consumers [about SCS], and the Office of Consumer Protection and the Attorney General's Office are working together to inquire into the complaints and determine what happened and whether any laws were violated."

Sieber said Angie's List set out to torpedo him. "They ruined a company I was going to leave to my son," he said. "It's been crippled. That's the truth."

Whether that's the whole truth and nothing but the truth could be up to a court to decide.

Chat with me tomorrow at 1 p.m. Go tohttp://www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.