It’s no secret that CornerStoreComics has suffered through a bad credit card theft incident recently. It’s no secret because Thomas Gaul, CSC’s owner, has been as honest and direct with his customers as he’s been legally allowed to.

And yet, there seems to be a campaign–particularly via parties on a particular forum that allows people to remain anonymous, and therefore not expose themselves to a defamation lawsuit–to destroy CSC’s reputation and business. Most of this has been limited to snarky comments, but today I read a post that claimed CSC deliberately sold credit card numbers in order to correct a budget deficit, and called them “no-good scammers.” This is flat-out childish and petty.

If you believe CSC or any other online retailer is guilty of illegal practices, you should collect whatever evidence you can and present it–without the editorializing–to the online community and, to put your money with your mouth is, the Better Business Bureau. Anonymously posting unverified claims like this is cowardly and vile.

I can’t tamp down my suspicion that whoever is posting these anti-CSC rants is someone with a personal axe to grind with the company or an unscrupulous competing vendor. To that person/people I say: grow the **** up.

It seems to me that Thomas has been on top of this since the moment it was revealed, has been as forthcoming as legally allowed by the involved credit card companies, and has improved security on the site above and beyond current CC standards. Yes, we’re going to continue to get stories of people whose credit cards are defrauded because they didn’t close their cards after receiving the warning email from CSC, but that doesn’t mean the incident is “ongoing” in that if you order something now with a card you’ve never used at CSC before, you’ll be in danger. You won’t be.

You might be inclined to be wary of CSC after this incident, and that’s fair, but take this story into consideration. I had a friend whose father worked for the FAA. I’ve always been a nervous flyer, and I had just found out that AirTran, the airline I was about to fly on, had once been Valujet, who had the disastrous Florida crash of Flight 592 in 1996. But my friend’s father said AirTran was now one of the safest airlines because they’d become especially attentive to safety procedures following the crash.

Of course, calling people out on the Internet for crap like this is just pushing that boulder up the hill one more time, but I’ve got this soapbox and occasionally I’m gonna use it.