Mahalo Hires Felon

2009-03-10

Mahalo is a human-powered search engine that creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search terms.

Most recently Mahalo has been making headlines for hiring a man who has just been sentenced to four years in federal prison, and forced to pay $20,000 in restitution and a $2,500 fine, for stealing hundreds of thousands of bank passwords with a massive botnet.

Jason Calacanis, Mahalo CEO, took to his blog to address the issue, stating "We didn't know John Scheifer was convicted of infecting 250,000 computers with bots when we hired him. We have a rigorous hiring process at Mahalo, in which each candidate must go through an average of five to eight interviews, and in which at least three, but more typically five, references are checked. Our CTO, and one of my oldest friends, Mark Jeffrey, did all of this with John, and he passed with flying colors."

Mahalo had taken the hacker through an extensive interview process, but did not do a simple Google search on his name - which would have revealed the crimes he had committed. A few months after John was hired, the VP of Operations at Mahalo found out about his crimes and brought it to the CEO's attention.

Calacanis states, "I chose to put my job and reputation on the line and keep John employed. At this moment, I'm honestly glad we didn't know about what John did when we hired him and I'm happy we've kept him on board. It's taught me a lot about society, computer crime and rehabilitation. In John, I see almost every computer programmer from my time 'hacking' on BBSes as a kid, attending hacker conferences and hiring 'white hat' hackers for a living." In the time that he has worked with John, Calacanis has said that he has been a model employee, and a model human being, adding that he would hire him again in a second.

But others see the situation differently. Dan Goodin, The Register, wrote "It would seem Calacanis didn't read the documents filed in Schiefer's extensive case history. Court papers cite a variety of aggravating factors, including 'bullying' underage accomplices to use his botnet software to steal people's personal information." The court documents also revealed that Schiefer bragged about how much money he was making off the bots and used stolen PayPal accounts to buy domain names. It seems that many are still confused as to why Mahalo continued to employ Schiefer.

Concluding his blog post titled " Why I employed a felon ", Calacanis writes "Life is short, we all make mistakes and I'm glad we've been given the opportunity to work with someone who needs the help and guidance."

He also added, "Note to Mahalo Users: John's work is well-supervised. Mahalo follows strict security policies and we don't store any sensitive data anyway. (Even if one of our employees did go off the deep end, the most they would have access to would be your questions and answers on Mahalo Answers - not much damage can be done there since they're all public anyway)."