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Bringing Down A Copycat Site
Nigel Cross wrote in with an interesting story from the world of software fraud. Cross writes "I found a copycat site fraudulently selling my own software and kept a record of the steps it took to bring him down."
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http://216.239.63.104/search?q=cache:Fuwwkr0yD5gJ: www.e-buyonline.com/
Google cache
Good luck buddy.
- chainsaws are used by serial killers?
- binoculars are used by stalkers?
- cars are used for drive-by shootings?
The fact that some products can be used for illegal purposes doesn't make producing the products wrong.
Every website wich collects e-mail adresses (so that's pretty much *every* website) has need for a tool to maintain their mailing list.
http://www.e-buyonline.com/mk.php
thats a nice and secure server if i must say myself. in one of the emails, he was specifically referring to being part of the esellerate affiliate program - if so, he should e using the esellerate e-commerce engine.. this guy smells danger everywhere, anyone who purchases software from this guy probably gets their credit card number stolen in addition to getting their email address added to the spamming lists (that he also sells)..
fun!
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
It looks like his pirater just changed the name and icon of the software. www.ebuy-online.com now has a program called Maillist Pro with a different icon but the exact same key features (minus extraneous whitespace) and a description that only differs in that the word King doesn't appear.
Check it out:
http://www.e-buyonline.com/maillist.php
Is this karma? Well, maybe so. But two wrongs don't make a right. The proper way of dealing with this guy - if his program really is intended to aid spammers - is to make his software illegal or, better yet, convince him to stop writing and selling it. And even then, stealing and reselling the program is hardly an effective vigilante response!
RTFA. The copycat only copied Maillist King which is a mailing list management package not a mass mailer. He abused the images for other software by applying them to spam tools. The rest was not software or any other tools from the original site. So the copycat is the one with the spamsoftware.
But your screenshots show 450,000 list members. Dude what legit mail list has 450,000 mail list members?
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Just for fun: Do you have permission from natalie imbruglia to use her photo? (you used it on a screenshot from one of your products)
Within minutes I received the following:
okey I had remove the logo and the software completely.
And with that single line I had won. I checked his site and all references to our software were gone.
Boy that really showed him! I'm sorry but I don't think emailing someone and asking them to remove the software "otherwise you will complain to the hosting company" quite constitutes the phrase "steps it took to bring him down". I was hoping for a story of how you chartered a private bounty hunting squad of ex-navy SEALs and pursued him through the jungle while your software was tied to a site under threat of being sold - hell it would have been nice if he'd been sued for $50 but asking him to remove it? Come on - more like "steps it took to send an email asking him to remove it" may be more appropriate!
Make the bastards suffer!
There's one problem however. He didn't design his website himself. Even that was stolen from somewhere else : www.lmhsoft.com (from whom he also ripped the e-Campaign software).
R.
This happened to Tony Arts - only worse - his domain was ripped away from him, and then whoever done it started charging for his free[ware] software!! (and he codes some good stuff - I used to use a few in my winders days)
t m
:-(
The 'Official' Toni Arts page now:
http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/index.h
and the unofficial 'ripped off' one:
http://www.toniarts.com/
If ever a site needs removing, it's that one
Account Suspended Temporarily Due to AUP Violation
Please contact abuse@pakhost.com for any questions.
Thank you for your cooperation!
Best Regards,
PakHost.com
it works;)
Nessus Scan Report
...
SUMMARY
- Number of hosts which were alive during the test : 1
- Number of security holes found : 6
- Number of security warnings found : 4
- Number of security notes found : 11
he he he
I'd bet there are lots of them.
Slashdot has more users than that, based on UsedID numbers. Most Slashdot users, I suspect, have Slashdot send them a daily email with the Slashdot stories, and a signifigant number are bound to receive emails when someone replies to a message, as I do.
The NYTimes is bound to have that many people on their mailing list.
Google has their "Google Alerts" feature. Wouldn't surprise me if over 500,000 email addresses have signed up.
Not to mention an inhouse list used for testing purposes or something similar. 450K sounds incredibly *small* for a spam list.
From the way you word that, I can only assume that you are implying that if it is larger than N, where N is some arbitrary number of people on the list, then it must be spam.
Just for a different view on it, I would venture to say that there are very few spam outfits out there that are only sending mail to 450K people (they are far more interesting in the 1-25M range).
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Reminds me of the time I was spammed by yellovvpages.com (note the v v instead of a w). I could have reported it as spam, but yellowpages.com has lawyers :)
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
...or a master flamebaiter
Yeah, but how can you defend a guy that got burned by the same type of people that he caters his software for? He knew what he was getting himself into.
The guy sells mail list management software. He is nothing LIKE the people who burned him. He is no different than Brent Chapman (creator of MajorDomo) except for the fact that the latter made his product community supported, Free Software. What's next, are you gona slag Apache because is it by far the most popular HTTP server used by fraudulent websites?
This frauster "Mohammed" is the lowest form of slimeball life. He wasn't just another spammer or BitTorrent pirate:
* He not only pirated the software, he did it with the intention to resell the pirated copies for a profit.
* He misrepresented himself as the creator of the software.
* He had an online shopping site that accepted credit cards--given his behaviour he intended to use those card numbers fraudulently
* He attempted extortion (demanding money, credit card numbers, etc for removal of the fraudulent site)
The author of the article succeeded in getting the site taken down, but if he hasn't done so yet, I believe he has an obligation to report "Mohammed's" activities to the authorities, as his behaviour is seriously illegal.
P2P apps may have perceived damages to a few large corporations, but they do not affect every single used of the internet like spam.
That is an absoulutely false and stupid statement. P2P is JUST LIKE email in terms of impact on network infrasutructure: used properly it is fine, but when abused it can cripple a network. At the height of the old Napster it slowed the sustained throughput of local cable ISP customers very noticeably. It is the chief reason for slowdowns on campus networks as well--in fact in some cases abuse of P2P apps is the chief reason for implementing bandwidth caps. I personally know of one remote site with internet connectivity provided by a sattelite uplink that racked up THOUSANDS of dollars in one months of fees because of a SINGLE KAZAA USER that shared all her music and lef thte PC on 24/7. As a result P2P was banned entirely. Incidentally, that same site had a Win2K box compromised and used to deliver spam, and it actually had LESS IMPACT on network performance than the P2P software did.