A few weeks ago we ran a story about an iPhone developer named Jon Atherton who was seemingly sending out emails offering bribes to sites for writing about his latest breast-wobbling application. We since updated our reports to indicate that after getting a reply from the application’s makers, doubts have been raised over the authenticity of the bribes. TechCrunch, one of the most read blogs on the web, reported on these bribes as fact yesterday after doing precisely zero research.

Last month, after we were forwarded one of the emails with the bribe information in, we spent two days researching the company and those involved. We spoke to the person giving out the bribes, we looked into if this had happened before and interviewed those who had been sent emails and those who agreed to write for the money.

After a week of further work on our part we found a couple of interesting things. Firstly, the FTC had been informed these bribes were going on. Secondly, Atherton (being contacted via the official company channels) denied all knowledge of the events and told us, in no uncertain terms, that we were either lying or somebody was impersonating him (he also told us we were the first and only people to get in touch). We updated our published articles to reflect this.

Over the past few days more of these bribe emails were sent out (from an email address not associated with the iPhone developer). One made its way to TechCrunch and the story was promptly picked up by one of the site’s newest writers (it’s their third post).

The damning story was published seemingly without the author bothering to cross-check email addresses, without bothering to get in contact with the company and without even using google to see if this has happened before.

Atherton replied in the comments section on TechCrunch (which caused TC to update their post) and also on his own blog. In the reply Atherton asks four questions:

1. Did you call the number mentioned above? If you did ‘“ did you leave a message on the voicemail. (it’s a skype-in number based in Australia)
2. Did you do a search for Wobble iPhone App on google and find that the actual blog is: http://chillifresh.com/ and the about page lists my real email address: http://chillifr’¦sh.com/about-2/ (the blog address mentioned above is also one of our domains, and the about page lists my real email address)
3. Did you DM me on twitter?
4. Did you look at your own articles you have written about Wobble in the past ‘“ and ask the author of those articles if they had my contact details ‘“ including my skype contact for IM?

TechCrunch is read daily by more than four million people and is one of the largest blogs on the web. It seems a shame sloppy reporting like this was allowed to end up on their front page. Checking back in my own emails, it turns out I contacted TechCrunch last month about this when it all first came out. All they needed to do was search their own inboxes.