Outrageous as it sounds, after Freedom Magazine exposed the anti-religious bigot’s shifty online scam, she admitted we were right on the money.
After all, there wasn’t any point in denying her role in a fraudulent Amazon reviews racket, since, well, she can’t, because it’s the truth.
In such a situation, it’s best to just come right out and own what you’ve done.
And Claire did.
“One of our Amazon friends said, ‘Hey, this would be a great business and it’s not a lot of work.’”
Product Reviews USA LLC, operating out of Castle Rock, Colorado—still actively online promoting their “services” as of this writing—is a review mill that, for a price of course, promises to provide 100%-satisfaction-guaranteed reviews for any company’s products, no matter how shoddy and worthless those products may be.
The website brags: “How does our service work? Simple! We are a large group of product reviewers. We work with Amazon sellers for all product categories and provide you with the reviews you need to boost your product sales and we help you launch your product and get it known!”
For $80, you can buy 40 reviews singing the praises of your product—even if it breaks in the first few minutes the purchaser tries it. For just $90, you can secure 50 ecstatic reviews. And, if you’re willing to pony up $200, you get a whopping “5-Day Product Review Campaign—75 Reviews,” calling whatever it is you sell the most wonderful thing since sliced bread. Again, from Product Reviews USA, it’s “100% satisfaction guaranteed”—for you the seller, that is, not for the customers they help you rip off.
Claire and her husband, Marc, declined to respond to Freedom’s original request for comment. No, rather than deny the allegations, they went on YouTube to confirm every detail of our report—and then some.
In fact, Claire admitted that she was not only the organizer and registered agent for Product Reviews USA (as reported by Freedom), but that she and Marc owned and operated the business, proudly cheating unsuspecting consumers out of their hard-earned cash themselves.
Marc explained the pattern: Sellers approach the couple with their products and say, “I need reviews on them.” Claire then offers her “100% satisfaction guarantee.”
This, she explains, “jump-starts” products.
Take, for example, a company selling yellow bean bags online. If “there’s a lot of good reviews for them, when somebody searches for a yellow bean bag and you’re just like the best reviewed yellow bean bag in the world, then it goes to the top of the search results and you can sell some pretty good numbers of yellow bean bags,” Marc explained.
Marc added: “One of our Amazon friends said, ‘Hey, this would be a great business and it’s not a lot of work.’” Always on the hunt for easy money, those five magic words—“not a lot of work”—were all the inspiration the pair needed to launch their scam.
Marc even asked Claire to confirm that the company had, in fact, delivered fake reviews to Amazon sellers, to which Claire responded: “Yeah, we did.”
There’s a reason the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) imposed strict rules last year to protect consumers—rules that businesses like the Headleys’ scam shop blatantly violate. “Fake reviews not only waste people’s time and money, but also pollute the marketplace and divert business away from honest competitors,” former FTC chair Lina M. Khan said.
There are plenty of bad actors just like Claire, as she will be the first to tell you. Scams like hers, she explained, are “very, very common.”
Here’s why it matters: Online buyers never get to see or hold the products they’re considering before shelling out their money. Instead, they’re forced to depend on reviews to guess if the product is any good or a waste of money.
But if a company uses fake, paid-for reviews to effectively lie about their product’s quality, innocent shoppers get bushwhacked into spending hard-earned cash on products that may be trash.
And that’s the shady corner of the internet staked out by the conniving Claire Headley.
Companies with great products don’t need fake reviews to sell them.
“These bad actors operate fraudulent businesses to facilitate the publishing of fake reviews for financial gain,” Amazon said in a statement.
And there are plenty of bad actors just like Claire, as she will be the first to tell you. Scams like hers, she explained, are “very, very common.” Marc, for his part, says that grifters like he and his wife “do this all over the world.”
Amazon noticed the same thing. The company says it took legal action against 94 such “fraudsters” over a five-month period and—in just one year—sued over 10,000 Facebook group administrators “that attempted to put fake reviews in our stores in exchange for money or free products.”
Claire’s operation is a textbook case of this scheme. As she bragged to unemployed anti-Scientology blogger Tony Ortega, the game was to “corral a large number of [reviewers] to write reviews of a product for an Amazon seller for a fee” that “would get a lot of attention to a seller in a short amount of time.”
In other words, what Amazon is suing for and the FTC is cracking down on is exactly what Claire Headley admits she and her husband own and ran.
It isn’t her first botched con. She and her husband filed a phony lawsuit in 2009, trying to hustle the Church of Scientology out of millions. Of course, they were thrown out of court—on summary judgment no less—and ordered to pay $42,000 to the Church.
So much for making easy money.
But that’s what the Headleys are: scam artists.
When you’ve been caught red-handed, and when the long arm of the press nails you—when they’ve really got the goods—there’s only one thing you can do: fess up, admit your sins and beg forgiveness.
As per usual, they’ve done all but the last part.
Marc Headley is a violent embezzler and a member of the Anonymous hate collective who stole Church audiovisual equipment, sold it on eBay and pocketed $15,490—a felony offense. His wife, Claire, also stole property from the Church, then joined with her husband to file a pair of fraudulent anti-Scientology lawsuits. The suits were promptly thrown out of court on summary judgment, with the Headleys ordered to pay the Church $42,000. “The record overwhelmingly shows that the Headleys joined and voluntarily worked for [the Church] because they believed that it was the right thing to do, because they enjoyed it,” a panel of three judges found.
Nevertheless, more than a decade later, Marc and Claire remain obsessed with the Church and its leader. When not spewing anti-Scientology hate, Marc has attempted to monetize a YouTube channel by boasting about getting so drunk that he passed out in his own vomit on Hollywood Boulevard, while Claire sits beside him, nodding and smiling vacantly.
