DecorMyEyes

Vitaly Borker (born 1985 or 1986 in the former Soviet Union), known by pseudonyms Tony Russo, Stanley Bolds and Becky S, is an American felon who has twice served federal prison sentences for charges arising from how he ran his online eyeglass retail and repair sites, DecorMyEyes and OpticsFast. were insulted, harassed, threatened (sometimes physically) and sometimes made the victim of small scams. After going into online retail following a short career as a computer programmer for several Wall Street firms, Borker encountered difficult customers who, he later said, were rude, lied to him and cost him money unnecessarily. He decided to be rude and unscrupulous with them in return, and learned to his surprise that on the Internet there was no such thing as bad publicity since the many posts with links to his site on complaint sites such as Ripoff Report appeared to drive traffic to his sites due to how Google's PageRank algorithm worked at that time, putting his site higher in results for searches on brand names than even those brands' websites, and making him money.

When New York Times reporter David Segal investigated the site in 2010, Borker freely explained this business model to him when Segal came to visit his house in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay, where Borker questioned the notion that the customer is always right and said he "like the craziness." A month later Borker was arrested by federal postal inspectors and charged with mail fraud, wire fraud and making interstate threats. He eventually pleaded guilty to fraud charges and making threats and was sentenced to prison for four years. Google and other websites whose flaws he had exploited in running DecorMyEyes also changed their practices and tightened security procedures.

Before entering prison, Borker and a friend had begun setting up another website, OpticsFast, offering not only eyeglasses for sale but repair services. After his 2015 release, he went back to his former business practices, which he mostly hid from his probation officer. Two years later, Segal reported on Borker's return in the Times, and Borker was again arrested and charged with wire and mail fraud associated with alleged harassment and abuse as operator of OpticsFast.

Following Borker's release in late 2020, Segal reported in the Times in 2021 that Borker appeared to have returned to selling eyeglasses online, under other personal and business names, and harassing dissatisfied customers through a new site called Eyeglassesdepot. If true, this would be a violation of a condition of his 2021 parole that he avoid any involvement in online retailing. In early 2022 he was arrested again on fraud charges related to the new site; he pleaded guilty to wire fraud a year later.

Biography

Borker told New York Times reporter David Segal in 2010 that he was born in Russia and moved to the United States with his parents as a child; exactly how old he was at the time is not definitely known. After graduating from Edward R. Murrow High School in 1989 and John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 1997 he began training as a police officer, working as a cadet in the office of a unit that patrolled public housing in Brooklyn. He soon changed his mind about his career path and enrolled in a school to learn programming. (According to Google, the links from complaint sites were actually not the issue since many of them included the nofollow setting, which would have told PageRank to discount them.) The company would not disclose the actual way Borker and DecorMyEyes ranked so high in search results, nor specifics of the solution it implemented, to prevent other bad actors from being able to better game its search results.

In May 2011, Borker pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Manhattan to two counts of interstate communication of threats, one count of mail fraud and one count of wire fraud. In September 2012, Borker was sentenced to four years in federal prison and ordered to pay nearly $100,000 in fines and restitution.

2017: OpticsFast

Before his imprisonment, Borker had a friend, Michael Voller, create a successor site, OpticsFast, to continue the business—with another friend's name on the incorporation papers—which he later reassumed control of after his release, offering this time to repair glasses as well as selling new ones. Members of Voller's family furthered the scheme by telling Borker's probation officer that he was working for their family business and fabricating documentation to support that. Borker resumed his tactics of selling customers cheap counterfeits of luxury brand eyewear and then insulting and harassing them if they complained or attempted to return or exchange the merchandise, again with the goal of driving traffic to his site through the links from online complaints, this time primarily on Yelp.

Joon Kim, acting United States attorney for the Southern District of New York said that "Borker's shameless brand of alleged abuse cannot be tolerated, and we are committed to protecting consumers from becoming victims of such criminal behavior". Borker's lawyer stated his client would "plead not guilty and defend himself against the charges", which carried a maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment. The terms of his parole forbade him from lying to his parole officers, which he had done when he had repeatedly denied he had started another online eyewear retail site. CNBC devoted an episode of American Greed to Borker in June. In April 2019, he was sentenced to two years in prison, (Federal prosecutors had sought a 3–4-year sentence.) Gardephe allowed the enhancements they sought under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Borker's role as a leader of the scheme and his failure to accept responsibility for his actions, evinced by a letter he wrote to Voller's sister late in 2018 promising to do everything possible to see that Voller, whom he alleged had exaggerated Borker's role in OpticsFast and minimized his own, went to prison for his role. But he denied three other enhancements: first, they had not offered sufficient proof that Borker's gains from the frauds he had allocuted to while pleading guilty were as high as they claimed in order to justify an upward variance from the applicable provisions of for his admitted offenses. Second, Borker had also made enough limited disclosures to his probation officer about working on the side for OpticsFast for the government to be unable to claim an enhancement to the sentence for obstructing justice on the basis that he deceived them about his employment. And lastly, the indictment had not provided notice that the government intended to seek sentencing enhancements for crimes committed while on pretrial release for other criminal charges. He was released from prison in November 2020. The Times noted that while he had apparently started it while still in a halfway house after his previous conviction, this time he seemed less audacious, content to merely sell used or counterfeit eyewear as new and genuine while not paying refunds, and provoking, threatening and abusing unhappy customers to a lesser degree than he had previously. In January 2023 he pled guilty to one count of wire fraud and was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

Personal life

At the time of his first arrest, Borker was married and had a daughter born in 2008.

In 2019, during sentencing in the OpticsFast case, Gardephe noted that Borker had been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, bipolar disorder and obsessive–compulsive disorder.