Ankur Jain: â€œI Would Like To Address My Dadâ€™s Characterâ€

Earlier today we wrote about a nasty survey scam that pre-IPO Intelius, the company founded by Naveen Jain after he left Infospace in late 2002, runs by customers after checkout. These customers are asked if they’d like to fill out a quick survey to get $10 cash back, but what they are really doing, via the fine print, is authorizing the transfer of their credit card information to a third party. The customer is then auto enrolled into a perpetual $20/month subscription for what appears to a completely bogus service.

We also pointed out that nearly all of Intelius’ revenue growth is driven by this survey scam, and questioned the IPO lawyers, bankers and accountants who have failed to discover it during the months-long due diligence process.

Jain’s son Ankur Jain (pictured right with Richard Branson) sent me a message via Facebook defending his father and suggesting that our original post is uninformed and misleading.

Ankur makes a number of assertions in his email. Among the more important: Ankur states that his father was cleared of any wrongdoing around the InfoSpace insider trading debacle, for example, and that the Seattle Times made false allegations against him (the three part Seattle Times story on Jain is here). Based on my review of the lawsuits, it seems that Jain was far from cleared of wrongdoing and the Seattle Times articles appear to be objective and well researched. In short, Naveen Jain did some fairly evil stuff with InfoSpace and paid out substantial amounts of money in fines and judgments.

Ankur also says that Intelius has “one of the strongest business models I have come across” and that the Adaptive Marketing survey scam/perpetual subscription is actually a legitimate service. As I described in my original post, based on my purchase of Intelius products and the subsequent voluntary tripping of the survey scam, I disagree strongly with both assertions. So do hundreds of consumers who’ve complained to the Better Business Bureau and other organizations.

The full message is below:

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