Whipped Cream Difficulties

Eric Toth is allegedly a bad guy. He stands accused of being a child molester and child pornographer. (I use the word “alleged” because he has not been convicted yet, though the evidence against him appears to be pretty strong.)

Toth was indicted on these charges in 2008 and went on the run. He managed to avoid capture, even though he was featured on “America’s Most Wanted” and made the FBI “10 Most Wanted” list, until a few weeks ago. Authorities found him in Nicaragua and shipped him back to the US to face charges.

Why do I note this here? Because there’s an Austin connection: Toth lived here for a while…

Colleagues knew the speaker under a different name as an Austin-based tech writer and computer technician they described as brilliant and friendly.

More:

The man people identified as Toth seemed to grow bolder. A few months earlier, he freelanced his first blog post for SMBNation, a small-business technology company, under an assumed name, according to people at the company and entries on the blog. In the months that followed, he contributed regularly to the blog on everything from Facebook’s initial public offering to cloud computing and wrote magazine articles.
An online biography says he was a “banker once upon a time” but didn’t much like it. The biography hints that “there’s even more to his story.”

He was invited to speak at a SMBNation conference in October, but skipped the country instead.

One of the big questions on my mind (and I’m sure other people in Austin are asking the same thing): did I ever meet this man?

Paul Mullen, the owner at the time [of P.C. Guru, where Toth worked – DB], said he had no reason to suspect the man, because his driver’s license and Social Security number checked out. Toth allegedly used bogus papers and stole identities during his time as a fugitive. The Post is withholding the name the man in Austin used because the identity may have been stolen, too.

I’m just going to point out that if you do a carefully crafted Google search using the phrase “banker once upon a time” and using the “site:smbnation.com” parameter, you’ll get results. And those results match the last name Toth was using when he was captured. (In Nicaragua, he was going by “Robert Shaw Walker“.)

I share some of the qualms the WP has, which is why I’m not directly linking to the bio on SMBNation. But I want to point out to the Posties that they’re not quite as clever as they think they are; the art of crafting Google searches like that is hardly arcane or mysterious.

(Also, SMBNation? You might want to address this somewhere on your site.)

This entry was posted on Monday, May 6th, 2013 at 11:48 am and is filed under Clippings, Geek, Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.