How Youtuber Louis Rossmann's beef with an Australian PlayStation repair whiz revealed a shocking past

As YouTuber Louis Rossmann watched his latest video upload, he felt sure he had made the right decision.

He knew his investigation into a mysterious and controversial Australian businessman would spark furious interest in his online tech circles, although he never could have predicted how dramatically it would take off.

"The videos that do well here are the ones where I am kicking a bully in the shins," the larger-than-life New Yorker says of his YouTube channel, which today has more than 2.2 million subscribers.

There has been no shortage of bullies to kick: from tech giant Apple charging huge sums for repairs that Rossmann could do for nothing, to the maker of a $400 baby monitor that started charging a subscription fee for features that had previously been free.

For Rossmann, the motive is simple: "You should own what you bought and paid for. A manufacturer shouldn't be able to take that away."

So, it caught his attention when Jessa Jones, a friend in the tech-repair community, contacted him last year about an Australian company that had banned her from using its software that she had paid for up front.

Emails laid out a bizarre customer service interaction between Jones and Better Way Electronics, which makes software to help diagnose problems with broken PlayStation consoles.

The company's owner — who went by "Louie" — boasted online that his software was used in 18,000 PlayStation consoles each week around the world.

That is because it could do something amazing: it could read secret error codes PlayStation's manufacturer, Sony, had programmed into every console, and tell the user what had malfunctioned.

"We can use our traditional tools of looking for physical damage. But often these motherboards will have no physical sign of damage whatsoever," says Jones, who owns a tech-repair shop in New York.

Essentially, Better Way Electronics's software could save Jones's customers from having to buy a new PlayStation.

Jones paid about $300 to buy a licence for the software, which at first worked perfectly.

"It was maybe two weeks later, after we were like, 'Oh, this is gonna be so great,' that we started to have problems," she says.

Access revoked

Better Way Electronics's owner, Louie, fired off an email as a warning: Jones would be banned from the software she just bought if she kept running it "in a modified state".

She had no idea what he meant, and told him she had only used it as advertised — to fix PlayStations. But Louie was unmoved, pointing to his terms and conditions, which stated he could revoke access at any time, even without providing a reason.

The pair went around in circles, Jones assuring him she wasn't trying to pirate anything and suggesting the problem must be at his end, and Louie not having a bar of it, until things got heated on both sides.

Their interaction ended with Jones being banned from using the software.

But Jones soon saw she was not the only one having problems; other people were saying online they were getting banned without cause, and without a refund.

"He routinely began banning people who had paid him, and that is really unacceptable," she says.

"I felt compelled to make sure that the repair community recognised that this guy is extremely likely to take your money and then rescind your access to the thing that you paid him for."

So, she reached out to an old friend, Louis Rossmann.

The beef begins

Jessa Jones was not the only person who had contacted Rossmann about Better Way Electronics.

"He was abusing people who are my colleagues, my friends," Rossmann says. "People that I know and work with on a regular basis will message me and say, 'I was banned from using this. He took my $3-600 and he is not giving it back.' I think that's wrong."

In April 2024, Rossmann decided to use his platform to give Better Way Electronics a rap on the knuckles.

As far as YouTube smackdowns go, it was a fairly tame video. In it, Rossmann laid out some complaints about how the company was treating its customers, stepping through the emails Jones had shared with him.

He ended it, though, with a flourish: a promise to throw serious money behind any programmer who was up for making a free, open-source version of Better Way Electronics's software.

"He made software that made it very, very simple for you to figure out what is wrong with the [PlayStation] console," Rossmann says. "And this meant that it was worth it for people to put up with this horrible behaviour."

Louie hits back

Louie from Better Way Electronics hit back strongly against Rossmann's video.

He said Jessa Jones had been warned that her computer was pinging one of the security systems he had embedded in his software, which would alert him if there was any risk someone might pirate his work.

"Louie, personally, is extremely suspicious of pirating his code reader, and I can understand that," Jones says.

But she had repeatedly told him she was not trying to pirate his software, and also that she thought one of his security systems, called Digital Rights Management (DRM), was invasive and beyond the norm.

Other people were saying the same thing, pointing out that Louie's DRM system could identify if you were running competitors' software. 

Some voiced concerns about the risk of malware or spyware if you did as Louie suggested on his website and turned off your anti-virus to run his software.

Louie shrugged this off, posting online that the people raising those concerns were just trolls who were mad he charged money for his software.

"There is no actual proof that I hack my customers, spy on my customers, breach any laws, or even go outside my own terms and conditions," he wrote on the Better Way Electronics website. 

"The fact that nobody has proven otherwise really speaks to the troll nature of the entire topic."

YouTube war escalates

Months passed, and beyond a little online sparring between Louie and some other tech repairers, the beef seemed destined to fizzle out. That was, until Louis Rossmann received an email from YouTube.

The email explained that someone had filed a complaint against the video he had posted about Better Way Electronics, claiming that sharing Jessa Jones's emails was a privacy violation.

He was sure the complaint had come from Louie — Jones hadn't complained — and for Rossmann, this meant war.

"One of the worst things you can do on this platform is try to get somebody else's video removed because you don't like what they said," he explains.

For YouTubers, strikes against their account can result in their accounts being punished — such as not being able to post videos for a week or two — or even being banned from the platform entirely.

"By filing these types of false strikes against it, you are risking everything that I've spent 15 years working for … If you're gonna do that to me, I'm looking into you and you would better be very, very perfectly clean."

Although Louie from Better Way Electronics had been on the repair scene for a while, no one knew much about him. He didn't show his face in his YouTube repair tutorials, and only went by his first name.

So, Rossmann decided to look into him, kicking off a collective investigation with his followers all around the world, scouring the internet for clues.

The first thing they found was that Better Way Electronics's website wasn't registered to a "Louie"; it was registered to someone with what seemed to be a woman's name.

Rossmann says his first thought was that this might prove useful to get refunds for everyone who was banned.

"I'll use the, 'Hey man, I see you're a tax evader. I could report you, maybe you could stop screwing people?'" he says.

Rossmann and his followers kept digging, eventually tracing Louie to an Australian Business Number (ABN), registered to a Louie Tahiri.

Curiously, the ABN record showed that until July last year, Tahiri had used another name — Luan Tahiraj.

A shocking revelation

When Rossmann searched for Luan Tahiraj, he was stunned.

News articles revealed that in 2013, Tahiraj had been jailed in Australia for offences against two girls, aged 13 and 14. In total, he served an eight-year sentence, with parole after four.

Court records show that Tahiraj sent the 13-year-old a file while chatting to her on MSN Messenger. He promised he would help her get more friends on MySpace, but it was, in fact, a remote administration tool (RAT).

Using the RAT, Tahiraj took over the girl's computer and threatened to destroy it and hack her social media if she didn't perform certain sexual acts for him. 

He then recorded these acts via her webcam and shared the video online.

This case was one of the first successful prosecutions of someone for using this technology in a crime of this kind, says Glen McEwen, a retired Australian Federal Police commander who was manager of cybercrime at the time of Tahiraj's prosecution.

The video of the 13-year-old was found by an AFP officer, who was undercover in a popular hacker forum. It was posted there with an eerie comment: "I'm Rofles, I destroy lives … I make a girl cry … Epic win?"

The officer traced this post back to Luan Tahiraj. But the tech-savvy then-19-year-old denied any involvement. He instead claimed he was hacked by an online rival he said was called "Digerati".

His denial prompted a years-long investigation by the AFP, as its technical teams had to forensically dismantle Tahiraj's claim that he, too, was a victim.

"Oh, he did it. There's no doubt," says McEwen.

"In these cases in the virtual world, the first line of defence will be the old defence of 'the dog ate my homework', to say 'I was hacked'."

McEwen says the AFP found evidence that Tahiraj had hacked 133 people using the RAT technology.

"They prosecuted on two matters, but there were many more out there that they did not prosecute, because it's about the quality of cases that you bring to court," he says.

There is no suggestion that these other people were underage.

"But it shows that the appetite didn't stop at two," McEwen says.

"It went far broader than that."

'It's exactly the same person'

In the wake of this revelation, Louis Rossmann kept searching for evidence to confirm that this man was definitely Louie from Better Way Electronics.

There were little crumbs scattered across the internet: the ABN was cancelled at the same time Luan Tahiraj went to prison, back in 2013, and was only reactivated in 2022, after his sentence ended. 

The Better Way Electronics website came online around the time that Tahiraj would have been released on parole. 

The two men appeared to have gone to the same Australian university, and both studied cybersecurity.

Further investigations by Background Briefing confirm that Luan Tahiraj was running Better Way Electronics from a home in Australia within the past two years.

Photos unearthed from Better Way Electronics's website that show its owner's workspace exactly match an office pictured in real estate photos of a property where Tahiraj was known to reside while the business was operating. 

In the real estate photos, a Better Way Electronics sticker is also clearly visible on a laptop.

The video goes live

Louis Rossmann found himself with a decision to make: should he share what he had found with his 2.2 million YouTube followers?

Ultimately, he decided that Better Way Electronics's owner had already been given a year to change how he was acting.

"He had banned somebody from using his software because he didn't like Egyptians, and this person was Egyptian. He had told somebody that you must be huffing too many lead fumes," Rossmann says. "This was a regular, ongoing thing."

So, he decided to hit publish.

But as he watched the video upload, he got an unexpected email. It was from Louie, from Better Way Electronics, saying he was closing the business and promising to un-ban people who had already purchased the software.

Rossman suspects Louie got wind from online chatter that the video was coming.

"I don't know what he was hoping for," Rossmann says. "Maybe he was hoping that I would just say, 'OK, I'm not gonna upload this'?"

But something the judge had said during Tahiraj's 2013 criminal case was lodged in Rossmann's mind.

"The judge in that particular case said in the court documents that he did not show remorse or contrition, that he thought he was clever in what he was doing," Rossmann says.

"I've hired people that have criminal records. I believe in people's ability to start fresh and start over, and I'm not going to judge you based on everything you did before.

"But I do believe … you have to say, 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry I did this. Here's what I did that is wrong.' It doesn't seem like he ever did that. He never even said, 'I'm sorry for what I did to my customers.'"

Going viral

Pretty soon, Rossmann's video about Better Way Electronics had over a million views and was still climbing. Other YouTubers started jumping on the train, making their own videos about the investigation, propelling its reach far beyond the tech-repair world. Chat about Better Way Electronics lit up on Discord, Reddit, X and even Facebook.

Online, Louie never responded to the claim that he was Luan Tahiraj, but he did refute that he was mistreating customers or spying on them.

He promised to release an independent analysis of his software.

But then, he wiped himself from the internet — social media, GitHub, YouTube, all gone.

The only thing that remained of his website was a landing page, claiming there was a police investigation into an attack on his servers. Queensland Police could not confirm or deny this, citing privacy reasons.

After weeks of trying to get in touch with Tahiraj and get his side, the ABC received an anonymous email — a complaint about an attempt to speak with him in person.

The email, clearly from Tahiraj, said he had chosen not to respond to calls, texts, emails and a letter from Background Briefing requesting comment.

He confirmed in the email that he ran the business anonymously, citing personal safety concerns.

He also wrote that he had been the victim of an online harassment campaign and doxxing.

The aftermath: 'The internet is good at policing'

Seeing her customer service complaint spiral into an internet feud that reached millions, Jessa Jones was shocked that Louie had treated users like her so poorly.

"I was incredulous that someone that had a pretty dark past — that I'm sure they would love to put behind them and never mention again — has just inexplicably just shot themselves in the foot like this," she says.

"This software was helping people fix PlayStations that they had bought and paid for, that they would not have been able to otherwise repair. Like, that's such a great thing to do with your life. And he just blew it up, for no reason."

For his part, Louis Rossmann denies that his videos about Better Way Electronics involved doxxing. He says any information he shared was all publicly available, including the number provided on the company's website for customer service enquiries.

The internet, he remarks, has a knack for finding things people want forgotten or ignored.

"The internet is good at policing these things when there's incentive, and there's definitely a lot of incentive when somebody treats people like this," he says.

Rossmann does admit that Luan Tahiraj was a potent example of how manufacturers can act in an abusive way, an almost "perfect villain" for his cause.

There's a hint of frustration, though, when he speaks about the response to his videos on Better Way Electronics, how the personal feud distracted from the bigger issue he cares about.

"At the end of the day … forget about him. I care about the general issue," he says. 

"I want as many people as humanly possible to understand what we do here, which is we are trying to push back against the idea that you don't own what you bought and paid for."

Rossmann now wants to shift all the focus that has come his way from this beef back towards the systemic issues he's been fighting against for years. 

To that end, he's started a new non-profit, advocating for the right to own the tech you have bought, and has also launched a new website, Consumer Rights Wiki, where anyone can log when manufacturers mistreat customers.

"Just planting a seed, or turning on a light bulb in people's heads to the fact that this is happening to them," he says.

"That's the win for me."