The day after publishing part 1 I got two messages. The first one through my website contact form, which allows to send a name, email address and message to me. While the name and email address were made up, the message stated (translated from German): “You’re lying in public? Very well.” According to the website iplocation.io, the IP address of the computer from which the website form had been filled out was Zurich, Switzerland. The content of the message, the timing and the location, which coincidentally is the city where the UniTranslate office is located, left little doubt about who the author of the message was, even though they had not identified themselves.

I received the second message less than an hour after the first one. This time it was an email from Mr. Polat, requesting that I take down the review from my website and Google Maps. He wrote that if I failed to comply within 24 hours, he would take legal action against me, as I was infringing the Swiss data privacy law. He concluded the email saying that I was sick. A couple minutes later he wrote again with another request: that I shall remove one of the two translations from the App Store in exchange for a refund, since according to data privacy law they had the right to withdraw their work at any time, or he would take legal action against me. I answered that I didn’t infringe on any law as far as I was aware, but that I would certainly take my review down and do what he asked for if he mentioned the exact law that I was supposedly infringing. He replied that he wasn’t my lawyer, and repeated once more that I was sick.

Then he said that he would contact Apple to take down the translation from the App Store, and that the best thing for me was that I talk to my parents. I tried to reason with him again, saying that I couldn’t correct my behaviour if he wasn’t even able to tell me what I was lying about and what laws I was supposedly breaking, and noting that his requests, if he wasn’t able to support them with proofs, were indeed threats. Reminding him that I had already agreed to remove his translations in exchange for a refund didn’t help, and he never proceeded to make the refund reality.

He said that not knowing the data privacy law was “unbelievable” and a “proof of your sickness”, asked “are you in love with me?” and wrote “you behave like a child talking to his father. You want to find your parents. But I am not your father. You are looking for your father. Unfortunately, I’m not your father. And you will find out when you’re reported to the authorities”. I asked him to stop insulting me, and noted that insults and harassment would be reason enough to take legal action against him. But that didn’t stop him. He continued: “You and your lies. It’s a pity, I see it as an accident. Sometimes one meets sick people like you. You’re even lying left and right. YOU ARE SO SICK, YOU WANT US TO FIRE THE PERSON WHO MADE MISTAKES. DO YOU THINK NO ONE MAKES MISTAKES?” I pointed out to him that again he didn’t provide any proof for my alleged lies, and that I had never even wanted, proposed or decided that anybody get fired, but it was him who had told me at the very beginning that the translator had been fired. He replied by saying that his company had forwarded the case to Apple and that they would do everything to remove my apps from Apple. He concluded that particular email with the ominous words: “I will do everything until you…” The ellipsis at the end is not mine but the end of his message, and he never specified what it stood for.

After some more disturbing emails, I explicitly wrote that unless he was able to give me proofs for his statements, I wanted him to leave me alone and wouldn’t reply anymore to his messages.

Three days later I received two more messages through my website contact form, the one through which I had already received a message evidently written by him. The IP addresses of both messages were again in Zurich, and both messages were in German (like Polat’s emails), contrasting to the fact that the website itself is in English. The first one, referring to the comments published by other users, read: “Are you talking to yourself? You have 1 download? Who asks the questions? Your mother?”, and the second one: “Hi crazy boy. What’s up? Are you still mad, and crying?” The same day he added a reply to my Google Maps review, writing among other things: “You wanted to get the translator fired because of a typo and you insisted on it. Then we basically realised that you are unhealthy. We strongly advise you to stop your compulsive behaviour of attacking a person over a typo and focus on your own business. If you continue to disturb us through strange channels of communication or threaten to revisit our office and make a fuss, we will have to exercise our legal rights.” Needless to say that I never threatened to revisit their office and have never visited their office in the first place.

Four days later I received an email from Apple: “On 6/8/2023, we received a notice from UniTranslate (NLP GmbH) (“Complainant”) that Complainant believes the app listed below infringes its intellectual property rights. In particular, Complainant believes you are infringing its copyright.  Please see their comments below.” Their comments below read: “The owner of this app uses our translation without our consent or paying for it in full. The translations in French and Spanish are created in our company, and according to the ownership rights, we own the full right for the translations, and he may not use them without our consent. We have contacted him many times, but he is not willing to cooperate, or pay what was arranged.”

When I read that, I instantly felt that he had gone too far. He had warned me that he would contact Apple, but he had also threatened that he would take legal action and report me to the police and the authorities, and I was never contacted by anyone (lawyer, police or authorities) on his behalf. Perhaps he thought that with Apple he had the best chance of getting something. I replied to Apple explaining that I was indeed willing to cooperate and repeated all the other things that I had already told Polat countless times, adding that he had never mentioned to me before that I hadn’t paid what was arranged. I even sent them the payment confirmation and an excerpt from one of his own emails which proved that he wouldn’t even have started the translation work without my payment: “The offer is accepted if you confirm it by e-mail and pay the invoice in advance. We only work with new and private customers in advance.” And since he was now slandering me and at the same time threatening my only source of income with the blatant lie that I hadn’t payed for his services, I decided that it was time to take legal action against him: I went to the nearest police station, requested the form to report insults, threats and defamations, filled it out at home and then handed it in at the police station.

Four days after the email from Apple, I got another anonymous message on my website contact form with IP address in Zurich: “You can do such good blow jobs.. thank you Nico.” On the same day, Mr. Polat slightly updated his reply on Google Maps.

Three days later, I wrote a tweet on Twitter linking to the review on my website. Less than four hours later, I got two more anonymous messages through my website with IP address in Zurich: “You fucking son of a bitch Nicolas Kick. I’ll have your mother fucked in the ass in front of your eyes. You will ask to get fucked too” and “Do you blow Tobias kick sometimes?” (I don’t know anyone named Tobias Kick.)

It was pretty obvious to me who was behind these anonymous messages, since their content, IP location and timing were highly suspicious. Besides, they were all insults of some form (I never got any insult on my website before) and written in German (the vast majority of messages through my website are written in English, as the website itself).

There’s another thing I didn’t mention before to avoid making this too convoluted. I had already received a couple disturbing anonymous messages months before, after I had contacted Tagesanzeiger, a local newspaper, telling them about the case. One message read “Tagesanzeiger fucks your mother.” IP address was in Istanbul, Turkey. Now, there’s three interesting facts about this message. First, it mentions the name of the newspaper even though only I, Tagesanzeiger itself and Mr. Polat (who was contacted by Tagesanzeiger, as Tagesanzeiger confirmed to me on my request) knew about this interaction. Second, it was apparently written in Istanbul, Turkey; Mr. Polat had told me himself of his trip to Turkey some weeks before and that since he was busy he couldn’t “take care of me”, and it’s worth mentioning the connection to Istanbul being the city where Mr. Polat studied (according to his Linkedin profile). Third, it was again written in German. The other message, referring to the public messages written by my customers, read: “These are all fake reviews here. But I really have a question, your contact details are not there?! How do you do business? Are you hiding from anyone?”

During the months that followed, I watched as the two one-star reviews for UniTranslate on Google Maps vanished. I had noticed that my review wasn’t visible publicly anymore, so I logged into my Google account, saw that the review was still visible in my private account, and resubmitted it. A couple seconds later, it was visible publicly again (I checked this from a private tab while logged out). Some days later it was hidden again, so I went on resubmitting the review several times, until at some point it never became public again. Since there is no official Google support, I opened a thread on a forum dedicated to the Google Local Guide program, but all the advice I got was that I should try to reword my review in case the spam filter was not happy with it, fill out a form to have my account reviewed manually by a Google employee, or simply forget about it. None of these things worked to make the review visible again, and I will probably never know the reason. The remaining one-star review, from a woman who had had another unpleasant experience with Mr. Polat, disappeared shortly afterwards, so that UniTranslate, for a period of time, had a perfect five-star rating.

I have serious doubts that all review on Google Maps about UniTranslate are real ones. Before I filed charges against Mr. Polat, UniTranslate apparently had two locations on Google Maps: one in Zurich, Switzerland and one in Vienna, Austria. The location in Vienna had three 5-star reviews: one by “NLP GmbH Beratics”, of which UniTranslate is a subsidiary (“Good price & performance, friendly employees!”), one by “berhan polat” and the last one by “Polat Orman”. Regarding my own review for UniTranslate in Zurich: almost every time I resubmitted it after I had noticed that it had disappeared, a few minutes later a new 5-star review was published, a couple times by an account named “Polat Capital”, other times by different account names.

The Vienna location disappeared shortly afterwards from Google Maps, not sure if it was ever a real thing. If it was fake, it wouldn’t be the first time Mr. Polat wants to make people believe that his agency is present at more locations that it really is. At the bottom of the UniTranslate website there is a list of several major Swiss cities: UniTranslate Geneva, UniTranslate Zug, UniTranslate Zurich, all of them links to pages with headers like “Our services in Geneva” and content like “Translation agency UniTranslate Geneva stands for high-quality translations, produced exclusively by native-speaking and experienced specialised translators”. Other city names come up when searching for them in Google, like UniTranslate St. Gallen or UniTranslate Glarus. I used the anonymous UniTranslate website chat feature to ask them where exactly their office in St. Gallen was, but only got dismissive replies.

• Hello, I was looking for an address in St. Gallen, but I don’t see any.
• Hello, please leave the contact details so that we can get back to you soon. Hello, how can I help you? Do you need a translation?
• Hello, I was looking for an address in St. Gallen, but I don’t see any.
• I ask you to fill out the chat form
• Can you tell me where the office is in St. Gallen?
• Thank you for your message. You are also welcome to reach us by phone between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.
• Thank you, but I asked a simple question. No phone call is necessary for this.
• Thank you again for your interest.
• Please don’t be offended, but am I talking to a bot or a real person?
• To a real person. But they have not filled out the form, and do not tell about your request. Therefore, I cannot inform you. You are welcome to call our office tomorrow.
• Thank you, but I just wanted to know where the office in St. Gallen is to know if it is suitable for me.
• Unfortunately, I can’t take care of you. Thank you for your understanding.
• I don’t understand. Why not? Can someone else answer my question? May I know who you are? Who am I talking to? Who am I talking to?

At the beginning of March 2024 I got an email from Trustpilot, the other platform where I had published an excerpt of my review of UniTranslate. The email informed me that my review was “flagged for containing harmful or illegal content. More specifically, your review was flagged as being defamatory.” I was then asked to provide proofs for some of the sentences in my review. I provided the proofs in form of the emails that I had exchanged with Mr. Polat, and after about two weeks the TrustPilot content integrity team was convinced and my review was back online. Unfortunately there’s no such appeal procedure on Google Maps.

Shortly afterwards, I noticed that someone else had published a one-star review about UniTranslate on Trustpilot. UniTranslate has 14 reviews on Trustpilot written during a period of several years, but that particular one-star review was already overshadowed 5 days later by a new five-star review (my own one-star review, written almost a year before, had been followed by a five-star review 9 days later). About the end of May 2024 I noticed that UniTranslate had replied to that review saying that they had no client registered with the name of the reviewer, and the same day I received an email from Trustpilot, asking on behalf of UniTranslate for my contact information so that UniTranslate could match my review to their client record. As if Mr. Polat didn’t know exactly who I am! Knowing what he is capable of, I have the impression that he is abusing this feature of Trustpilot in the hope that all one-star reviews decide to ignore his request and he can argue that they are probably invalid. I, for my part, immediately replied to that request with the same contact details Mr. Polat already had from me, and my review stayed online.

Three days after I supplied my contact information, UniTranslate left a reply on TrustPilot: “Your claims are wrong. Your allegations were even rejected by the Swiss Court. There is even a court order about this. You should immediately remove this review. You are spreading fake information. But this website keeps your fake review posted. And whoever hired you to spread lies about our company, this person should know that you are doing a very bad job. Because our customer’s base is growing daily. Try harder Nick.” A few minutes later he changed the text to: “Your claims are fake. You are a person who sued Swiss state because your allegations were proven fake. The reader should know that Nicolas Kick sued the Public prosecutor’s office in Zurich, because his allegations were proven fake. He is now trying to prove that the Swiss State is now giving him his rights. By the way he also wanted our colleague to be fired from her job, although the minor errors were corrected. The errors had also nothing to do with us, they were “coding errors” in his application. But he wanted us to correct them. So we kindly ask the reader to know this facts before taking him seriously.” Once more, needless to say that nobody hired me to spread lies about him, none of my allegations were proven “fake” (a word he apparently likes using a lot, and was also used in one of the anonymous messages), I didn’t want anybody to be fired, and the problems with the translations were no “coding errors”. One of the problems was that he had gotten the text encoding wrong, and he probably still thinks that the text encoding has something to do with programming (which it does not).

A few weeks later, I noticed that the only other 1-star review had already disappeared from TrustPilot, so that my own review remains the only negative one. The disappeared review read (translated from German): “Miserable service, incompetent employees, intransparent fees with only average translation quality.”

A few days later, after I updated my review on TrustPilot to include the fact that it had been verified by the content integrity team, he changed his reply yet again: “Dear Mr. Kick, Who would write such a review? Nobody has ever discussed anything other than business with you. You have threatened to come to our office and cause chaos. You wanted my colleague to be fired and called us 10 times a day for months from various phone numbers. […] We believe you are being paid to write negative things about us on the internet. You are spreading lies about us constantly. Our business will continue to thrive because we are committed to doing our job well. We are probably still the fastest-growing language company in Switzerland. You do your job, and we will do ours. Let’s see who will come out on top!” I already told you that I had never visited their office or threatened to do so. That I had called them 10 times a day for months was new information from his side, also false. We had had one or two phone calls at most (I don’t remember anymore), the content of which I reported in the first part of this series.

In June 2024, I noticed that two additional one-star reviews were published on Google Maps about UniTranslate. I screenshotted them both so that I would still have evidence of other unsatisfied users in case the reviews would be removed later. In July, one of the two had already disappeared. The author was a former UniTranslate employee, which I could confirm after looking his name up and finding out that he had written a blog post on the UniTranslate website. The vanished review read as follows:

“I have been working with UniTranslate/NLP for more than two years now, and this is my experience with it: The owner does not pay well, often charging clients many times higher than he pays his freelancers to whom he owes his success. What’s worse, he completely relies on machine translation for all projects, not matter the importance. This is a major privacy risk since customers probably do not consent to having their names, birthdays, and addresses sent to DeepL, Google translate, or ChatGPT. What happens if there is a data breach? He works as the sales team, payment], and project manager all at once. He refused to pay my latest invoice. When I asked what was wrong, he replied with a cryptic email that doesn’t make any sense. I provided a significant discount just to get it over with, and he still refused to pay. He didn’t reply to any of my next four emails to fix the invoice and move on. Do not be fooled by the reviews. Many could be fake, and companies don’t usually ask for reviews if the client had a bad experience. He does not even take the time to personally reply to your reviews, so he uses ChatGPT to do that for him. There are many better agencies and freelancers who will treat you a lot better and do a much better job.”

This review partly coincides with the only 1-star review currently visible on Google Maps, which translated into English reads as follows: “Absolutely not recommended as a client for translators: almost never pays on time and only after repeated requests, not a word of explanation or apology, rude, unpleasant tone of communication, poor communication during order placement and processing.” The fact that both reviews mention similar things and confirm my personal experience with Mr. Polat leads me to believe that they are both genuine.