I'm about a week late with this I admit, but the New York Times had a great piece about DecorMyEyes, a New York-based online eyeware seller with a, shall we say, unique business model: they defraud their customers on just about every transaction, stonewall and/or threaten them when they complain, and then let the resulting online complaints drive them to the top of search engine rankings. The guy behind the site admits to all of this, on the record.
What the guy's doing is clearly a criminal enterprise, and I imagine it's only a matter of time before the guy gets indicted on some sort of racketeering charges (on top of multiple instances of threatening to sexually assault female customers.)
Meanwhile Google, which changes their algorithm all the time, has made some changes to make such things harder to do.