Blackhat competition - how do you deal with them?

[cernus11]

How does everyone deal with blackhat competition. In our industry there are no doubt quite a few shady characters. I guess some people will argue that a lot of webmasters are "blackhat" to an extent due to link buying ect.

I'm talking about the real big black hatters. Such as ones that will spam your site with links then report you in an attempt to get you banned from google. Or bombarding your site with proxie hits until the hosting overloads, then contacting all your natural links sources and stealing them.

Is there any way to stop this? Is it a problem for any of you?

James