Law

Happy Holidays and Novelty Gifts is a company that was started by two best friends Kendall Goodman and Rita Odintsova. The business initially started out in the basement of Kendall Goodman’s home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Kendall was a stay at home mom who ran a small party decoration business to help supplement the family income. Rita Odintsova had worked for ten years as a website developer for a local company in downtown Philadelphia. Both friends came up with the idea to combine their skills and knowledge of their current jobs to create a web based company called Happy Holidays and Novelty Gifts. They sold novelty items year round online, but specialized in fantastic and creative Holiday supplies, (Decorations i.e. Halloween Monsters, Costumes, Yard Blow-ups, etc.), and all things out of the ordinary. They sold across the United States. The manpower was kept to a minimum, most of their product was supplied by large retailer overstock, and the majority of the work was done online. After the first year the company had expanded to 30 employees that consisted of ten call center phone/online order takers, four buyers and sixteen warehouse/product fulfillment workers. Towards the end of the third year Rita wanted to expand the business to Canada, but Kendall was satisfied with things the way they were. This caused friction between the two friends and the decided that they would split the company and part ways. The value of the business was 3 million dollars.

Kendall Goodman retained the name of the business Happy Holidays and Novelty Gifts and the website which was called www.HappyHolidays&NoveltyGiftStore.com along with one half of the inventory. Since Kendall was not interested in expanding to Canada she bought out Rita’s portion of the warehouse so she could continue with no interruption to her business. As part of the dissolution of the partnership there would be a link on the Happy Holidays and Novelty Gifts website explaining that Rita was expanding Canada. Kendall agreed to allow this link for a period of one year from the date the partnership had ended. Rita with her background in Website Development create a new website called www.TheHappyHolidaysGiftStore.com and purchased a warehouse in Toronto, Canada to begin her business there. The name of her business is called The Happy Holiday Gift Store.

One year later the web site of the original Happy Holiday’s and the Novelty Gift Store showed that it has had more views than that of The Happy Holiday Gift Store. Kendall Goodman’s business was a well-established company that had been advertised and used by customers longer than Rita’s store in Toronto. Many customers of the Happy Holiday’s and the Novelty Gift Store have the web paged saved in their bookmarks, or prefer to use link with familiar domain name rather go to Rita’s web page link within the site. As a result Rita Odintsova store based in Toronto, Canada suffers financial loses and struggles to stay in business. On the other hand, store with the original name and web address continues to grow.

Rita in desperation to capture more of Kendall’s online sales uses SYN floods, a type of denial-of-service attack, to overload the competitor’s server with false user requests and make their web page unresponsive. In addition to the SYN attacks, Rita sends out mass email blasts to all customers with a link to her online business web address www.TheHappyHolidaysGiftStore.com . As a result, customers have become angry with the original “Happy Holiday’s and the Novelty Gift Store” and start looking for the alternative ways to shop for gifts. Because The Happy Holiday Gift Store had similar name and type of products, many of the customers choose to shop there since it appeared to look the same. Shortly after, Happy Holiday’s and the Novelty Gift Store realizes that they become victims of the SYN flood attacks and start cyber-investigation which shows that “The Happy Holidays Store” is responsible for this attack. Kendall Goodman is deeply saddened by the betrayal and criminal actions that her former partner and friend Rita Odintsova has turned to. Kendall Goodman files a Civil Lawsuit and is pursuing pressing criminal charges with against Rita Odintsova.