Merchant games Google by being obnoxious to customers

This morning I was puzzling over an online merchant who consistently rips people off, lying, cheating them, running bogus charges on their card, threatening them, and yet continues to be in business and to be able to take cards. Then I read about someone who was doing this deliberately in order to increase his rankings in Google:

"he’d hired a search optimization company to burnish his site’s reputation by writing positive things about [his online shop]. Odious behavior, he realized, worked much better [than SEO], and it didn’t cost him a penny."

Basically, he has thousands of links from a number of authoritative consumer complaint sites that cause his site to appear first for various keywords, like manufacturer names. He also claims to game Visa and MC by being more or less threatening, cheating, and obnoxious depending on his percentage of chargebacks:

"The only real limit on his antics is imposed by Visa and MasterCard. If too many customers successfully dispute charges in a given month, he can be tossed out of their networks, he says. Precisely how many of these charge-backs is too many is one of the few business subjects that [this fellow] deems off the record, but suffice it to say he tracks that figure carefully and dials down the animus if he’s nearing his limit. Until the next month arrives, when he dials it back up again."
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