Is a Google Employee ripping off Jeremy Schumaker A.K.A. Shoemoney? It sure looks that way, according to a lawsuit that Shoemoney has just filed.
It all began about four months ago, when Shoemoney noticed someone’s ad in Adwords using the word “Shoemoney”. Google, of course, forbids this practice (bidding on trademarked terms) so how the violator managed to pull this off is a bit of a mystery.
Jeremy tried unsuccessfully to reach both Google and the perpetrator. The owners of the website running in the ad has registered the domain name privately, meaning that Shoemoney could not easily contact them directly.
Therefore, Shoe got a court order and forced the violater’s web hosting service to reveal the owner’s contact information.
Jeremy reached the site owner, who played dumb and didn’t seem to be in any hurry to cooperate with Shoe’s request to stop using his trademark.
That’s where the black helicopter conspiracy theories begin.
A friend of Schoemaker’s noticed that the perpetrator had several friends on Facebook who just happened to work for Google Adwords.
Also, a cached version of his LinkedIn profile indicated that he is an Adwords Account Strategist (the title has since been removed).
Shoe also determined that there is, in fact, a Google employee with the violator’s same name listed on the roster. Hmmm.
Schomoney has now filed a lawsuit against the website owner.
In response to this whole mess, Google has issued the following reassuring statement:
“‘While we take this kind of allegation seriously we’re not able to comment on specifics.”
Well, I feel better now. Don’t you?
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