An administrator of the popular UCLA Facebook group “Free & For Sale” recently sued the group’s former administrators for $27,000 in compensatory damages and emotional distress damages and $10,000 in punitive damages.
UCLA alumnus Daniel Yadegari filed a lawsuit in October against UCLA alumnus Amos Ng and current UCLA student Eric Sandouk for allegedly damaging Yadegari’s relationship with the company Buddytruk, which was briefly an advertiser on the Facebook page. Yadegari’s legal representation is his brother, Michael Yadegari.
“Free & For Sale” is a public Facebook group for students and alumni, allowing individuals to post their belongings for others to buy or collect. In recent days, the debate around the lawsuit has been widely followed on the group’s page, which has more than 13,300 members.
Yadegari, Ng and Sandouk declined to interview for this story, but several court documents and public posts on the Facebook group detail Yadegari’s allegations against the other administrators.
According to the lawsuit filed by Yadegari, on Sept. 10 he messaged Ng, who was one of the administrators of the group, to ask if he could earn money by advertising on the Facebook group and if he could split the profits with Ng.
The complaint alleges that Ng agreed and made Yadegari an administrator of the group the following day. Yadegari alleged he worked to create rules for the group and make the group appealing to advertisers.
At Yadegari’s request, Ng allegedly instructed Sandouk, also a new administrator, to refrain from changing any group posts or photos, as these activities could violate business agreements with potential advertisers, according to the complaint document.
The next day, Adam Jacobs, Buddytruk marketing director, emailed Yadegari as the page administrator to learn more about advertising on the group, according to the complaint. Yadegari alleged that Ng then agreed to the terms of the advertising agreement, and on Sept. 16 the advertisement for Buddytruk was posted as the page’s cover photo.
Ng and Sandouk allegedly blocked Yadegari from the group page later that day, after Yadegari collected the check from Jacobs, the complaint said. The Buddytruk advertisements were removed, and Jacobs asked for his money back from Yadegari, according to the complaint.
Over this past weekend, Sandouk and Ng removed themselves from their administrative positions in the group and posted identical public messages apologizing to Yadegari on the group’s page.
They also reappointed Yadegari as an administrator over the weekend, and Yadegari added his girlfriend as an administrator Sunday.
Soon after Yadegari became an administrator again, many students began joining “Free & For Sale at UCLA,” a copycat of the original group that Yadegari does not have access to, according to posts on the “Free & For Sale at UCLA” page.
Over the past months, several group members have posted and commented in the original Facebook group claiming that Yadegari unfairly blocked group members who did not violate the page’s rules. One public post on the copycat page explained how students could report Yadegari’s alleged misconduct to Facebook.
The rumors of what happened between the three, including the incident with Buddytruk, have spread over both Facebook groups. Many outside parties have commented and posted their thoughts about the incident to the original page. Lawrence Lagera, a UCLA alumnus, posted a satirical screenplay of the incident to the group.
Yadegari also ran for undergraduate student government president in May 2011.
Read the complaint below:
I think we should be glad Yadegari did this. His actions mean that the rest of us have one less person to compete with in the world.
Well nevermind.
Yadegari got accepted to medical school.
Scary how such an awful person will become a physician
Scary how petty some people are to judge someone and invest so much time and effort into something that effects them in zero way.
You have a page with over 10k people… obviously you’re gonna put advertisements on it. The first group of admins are idiots, and clearly quite sore if they felt the need to start a second page. Whatever. At the end of the day, the only winners here are UCLA students benefiting from the competition (IE sellers that now have double the ad space to advertise twice to the same people…wait), and Danny.
Sorry, but Danny did right defending his interest legally. It’s the other party that’s behaving like they’re in middle school.
Thanks for contributing, Danny.
Don’t be mad cuz you got permabanned for being an @ss-hat
Posting third-party advertisements to a page is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use.
That was so dumb it hurt. Posting advertisements from student associations and local companies without turning a profit is not a violation – it’s something student groups at UCLA do EVERY.SINGLE. DAY. Have fun finding this imaginary money
They didn’t start another page, it always existed as the bro page. People are moving there because they don’t like Danny. All he won is now thousands of people don’t like him. Don’t call people idiots when you are clearly one yourself.
Who cares? A tiny fraction of the original group (<200 people ie <2%) dropped, and the number filled right back up. Sucks to suck, idiot.
Why are there so many spelling errors and mistakes in this complaint? How embarassing.
The best part of this is that they linked to the screenplay. That screenplay deserves an award. I’m hoping for a part 3!
Working on it! 😀
keep on it 🙂
Screw all the admins at that page. It’s a complete shitshow. I wish they could both lose the case.
I’ll just leave this right here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder
http://www.yelp.com/biz/computers-squad-los-angeles. The yadegari’s have
had a history of litigation. check out their response to a one star
review.
This is how Danny Yadegari treats his fellow peers and students: http://i.imgur.com/N5wdFx1.png
Update several months later: Daniel Yadegari has changed his profile name to Dan Yade. He still makes occasional obnoxious comments on other people’s posts and is still harassing and banning anyone who doesn’t follow his uptight rules or calls him out for his hypocrisy, but the group has grown to more than 19000 members partly due to Daniel adding masses of UCLA students. There are also somewhat annoying pinned post ads for student businesses run by Daniel in exchange for donations by the business to the cpo food closet. He also seems to be able to track any criticism in the other copycat free and for sale group, as some have noticed being banned after discussing his actions on the copycat group, possibly through close friend or fake account Danny Bernoulli. Since he is premed, he is also the admin of the UC premed advising group, but thanks to other active admin, he can only make helpful comments along with a few sarcastic ones.
So he is a slightly sarcastic person who uses the page to help donate to student charities? Whats the problem?
Also I have seen those anti-danny posts in the other groups and they are outright abusive… why shouldnt those people be banned?