Mystery man runs Indian consumer complaints site
By Ria Sharma

Every day, thousands of frustrated Indian consumers search Google and Yahoo looking for sites where they can bring their grievances to the attention of the concerned business and the Indian Govt.  One name that keeps cropping up is the Indian Consumer Complaints Forum. Typically, complaints would be about Airtel, BSNL, Nigerian scams and the like.

The Meta data of this Indian consumer complaints forum (Consumercomplaints.in) describes it as “Information for consumers regarding fraud and scam companies. Complaint registration”.  According to Siteanalystics, this consumer complaints site drew in 48 thousand unique visitors in August, 2009, 65 percent of whom came in via Google and Yahoo search engines.  91 percent of all visitors were from India followed by United States and Great Britain.

Only problem? The complainants rarely get a response.  And especially never from the person who runs this ‘Indian consumer complaints forum’.  You see, he is not even Indian and has never lived here.  Domain Tools shows that Mark Shultz from Riga, Latvia started this site in Oct, 2007 and has been running it since.

Latvia is a member of NATO as well as the European Union.

Mark Shultz also owns complaintnational.com and tens of other sites with these names.  The idea is to create a site which draws traffic.  Once you have the eyeballs, earn revenue from Google advertising to men and women who logon thinking this is an ‘official’ Indian complaints forum.

Perhaps, the most audacious part of this site is that strictly speaking he may not be breaking any laws as no where in his site does he promise anything to any consumer.  Needless to say, the consumercomplaints.in site does not have any contact phone number or address as well.  Mark Shultz is a mystery man with no public information available about his education and work history.

Quite audacious is it not?