Hello, One of my websites has been copied completely. It is an exact copy, they even with my support email address and company name. The only thing they have changed is the buy now link. Instead of going to clickbanks order page it goes to their own paypal account. I have been receiving emails from people requesting support from customers that have actually purchased through their paypal link. They are advertising their website on google adwords and taking customers away from myself and my affiliates. I have sent an email to their host but no success so far. Google doesnt seem to be much help and paypal offered very poor support. Any ideas? Swerd
DMCA with Google - http://www.google.com/dmca.html Find their ISP and DMCA with them - http://who-hosts.com/ Hire a lawyer and paper 'em
A lawyer sounds like a great idea. Doesn't have to be official, just look official. If you're articulate write them a letter yourself pretending to be a lawyer. Just a letter may scare them off. I'd say it's a 50/50 shot but it wouldn't cost you much, if anything.
Your best bet is probably to try to get their domain and hosting shut down. You can find the registrar for their domain at whois sites such as http://who.is/ . You can find their host by using the http://who-hosts.com/ site mentioned above. Do some searching at http://archive.org/ to find proof that your site was up first, and make a copyright violation complaint to their domian registrar and host. If their site includes email links, etc, that link back to you, you can probably use that as proof of copyright violation too.
thats probably not the best idea mxracer170 has the part of this that kind of sucks is a lawyer costs money. are you making enough money off the site to justify hiring a good lawyer?
write them a letter stating that if they don't take correct action, you will be contacting your lawyer.
Here's a thread I came across on another forum which may be of use:- http://www.ozzu.com/general-discussion/don-afraid-send-dmca-takedown-notice-t93810.html
You are not committing fraug by writting a letter that states you represent so and so. By law, you have the right to represent yourself in all legal matters, you also have the right to have an attorney represent you. Something along the lines of hello, I'm representing so and so, cease and desist your theft/copyright violation now. However, I would skip the C&D notice, take em to court. Also, look towards a criminal approach as well, as they are now committing theft. What is your domain name and what is theirs? You would have to make the criminal complaint to wherever the servers are hosted, but, you should also be able to make the complaint to whoever has jurisdiction over the case.
Hello, Thank you all for the responses. I would prefer to keep the domains private. The person doing this is probably on these forums. Actually, I just clicked the buy now button on his site and I get this message from paypal, "This recipient is currently unable to receive money." Their site is still operating and I would like to take that down too. Thanks again for the advise and links. Very helpful. Swerd
Like? I'm not telling him to commit fraud. All he has to do is say that he has sought legal counsel and ect.... Or just pay a lawyer $50 to write up some sort of copy write infringement letter. I know if I got a letter like that it would make me second guess who's site I was copying. All you need to do is scare him enough so he copies someone else’s site. (hopefully not mine).
Build a site close to his site name.Target all of his site keywords and then when optimised 100%. When visitors come into the site tell your story with a big This xxxxx.com is a SCAM~~
I've had the exact same problem many times. Send them a DMCA takedown notice giving them 24 hours to remove all copyrighted material belonging to you,or else you'll seek legal advice on the matter. Should be enough, If they dont do it give us webmasters details and we'll try and help you out
Wow. Why not send a DMCA notice? takes only 5 minutes! This wouldnt work fully to, not everybody finds sites via search engines, and if you did this you would be ranked lower than the other site for duplicate content. It still doesn't deal with the problem. Not only that,the guy could sue you for deformation of character.