Work from Home Wisdom fraudsters taken down

How we tackled the scraping of Work from Home Wisdom.

A few weeks ago I told you how we accidentally discovered that someone had copied, or scraped, the Work from Home Wisdom website in its entirety. At that point A had gone to one of the Whois websites and found out the supposed owner of the site and the company looking after the domain name. So we knew the name of the owner was fake, and the domain company told us the hosting company was TalkTalk.

Here’s what happened next so you can replicate it if your own site is scraped:

• A sent an email to TalkTalk’s abuse department, and their legal team replied it was not their responsibility as they did not look after the hosting. Their search had revealed Datacenter Luxembourg were hosting the scraped site.
• So A sent an email to their abuse department, but had no response. At this point we went off on holiday and so there was a pause in the chase.
• On our return A looked at Datacenter Luxembourg’s website and found the name and email address of someone in their admin department. He forwarded all the correspondence and asked her to help. She came straight back saying she would forward it to their legal department.
• A couple of days later they sent an email saying that they had also discovered that the hosting had been paid for ‘by fraudulent means’ and that they had suspended service to that domain.

So celebration all round in the Work from Home Wisdom household. If we had had no joy from the hosting company we would have sent a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice to Google.

I’ve now discovered that if you register with dmca.com you can get a free protection badge for your website (there’s even a choice of badges so you can match the style of your website) and get one free DMCA takedown a year if your content is stolen. So Work from Home Wisdom will be getting a new badge in the near future!

Thank you to everyone who offered help, advice and moral support – we appreciate it 🙂