Children First Volunteer Fights Subpoena in Deceptive Website Case

After insisting an impostor set him up to take the blame for several deceptive election websites, a Capistano Unified Children First volunteer is now fighting a subpoena to uncover the identity of the sites' owner.

Last month, Chris Korpi was fingered as the person behind two sites with URLs that impersonated Parents Advocate League president Julie Collier: juliecollier.com and parentsadvocateleague.com (the real site uses a dot-org domain name).

The sites, now disabled, instead took visitors to school board president Gary Pritchard's campaign website and to Children First's homepage. Children First spent at least $38,000 for a slate of four school board candidates, including Pritchard and incumbent John Alpay, according to campaign financial statements.

Korpi denied any involvement in the scheme, claiming an impostor registered the websites under his name with Internet host GoDaddy.com.

Collier has since filed a lawsuit against the “John Does” behind the domain names.

Collier's lawyer, Wayne Tate, is also seeking the source behind two other deceptive sites: dawnurbanek.com (which redirected visitors to Alpay’s campaign site) and bill-perkins.com (which sent people to Pritchard’s site). Urbanek is an active CUSD critic while Perkins was the candidate who lost to Pritchard.

Korpi, who provided Alpay with more than $2,500 in "campaign management services" this year, previously told Patch, "I categorically deny" registering the deceptive websites.

Tate said he asked Korpi to sign a statement to that effect but Korpi declined.

Because GoDaddy said it couldn’t guarantee the identity of any registrants, Tate subpoenaed both the company and Korpi for the identity of the person or group that paid for the misleading URLs. GoDaddy informed Tate the registrant has the right to object to the subpoena.

Korpi has done just that.

“Chris Korpi/Korpi Marketing Services objects to the disclosure by [GoDaddy subsidiary Domains by Proxy] of any information regarding his accounts or registration of any URLs or domain names,” states a response to the subpoena.

Korpi's lawyer, Robert K. Sall of Laguna Beach, cited several objections in his response, saying the subpoena was overly broad and not valid in Arizona, where Domains by Proxy is based.

Said Tate: "Sure isn't consistent with someone who claims he was a victim of identity theft."

Neither Korpi, his lawyer, nor representatives from Children First could be reached for comment by Patch.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Article edited slightly to show that Korpi provided his campaign management services to Trustee John Alpay as a non-monetary contribution.