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."

Comments

Seems like he has alot of work to do

[Omniscientist]

After doing a Google of "MailList King", there unfortunately seems to be an abundance of sites that have his software for download. On the official website, you must pay first, so it appears he has quite a bit of copycats/pirates to track down.

Good luck buddy.

His effort was not enough

[statusbar]

http://www.e-buyonline.com/purchase.php and http://www.e-buyonline.com/mk.php still allows you to enter in credit card info to purchase the stolen program.

--jeff++

Re:His effort was not enough

[dasunt]

http://www.e-buyonline.com/purchase.php and http://www.e-buyonline.com/mk.php still allows you to enter in credit card info to purchase the stolen program.

That's okay, the resulting slashdotting will kill it. :)

In all seriousness, this guy doesn't seem to be beyond the reach of US law. His hosting appears to be from Pakhost, who *tada* keeps their servers in Michigan and Texas.

Remember that DMCA thing we bitch about? Time to write a takedown notice to the hosting company citing the infringing material in question. In addition, once you have collected that information, take a few extra minutes tracking down the legitimate owners of the other software on the site, explain what you did, and share that information.

[ If I'm wrong and his hosting company isn't in the US, a careful inspection of the online store reveals no validation of ording information other than a valid email address. A bitter, wronged coder could write a script to string together valid-looking names, locations, emails, and credit card numbers, then flood their ordering page. It appears that the order information is checked manually, so the above action would end up DOSing their ordering channel. Depending on your location, and the location of the server, this may be very, very illegal, and thus I don't advise it.]

Still more work to go

[neXus_umr]

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

Re:MailList: Used by Spammers?

[ctr2sprt]

I hate to do it, but I'm going to have to trot out my standard freedom argument. Much like proponents of free speech sometimes have to support really objectionable speech (like KKK rallies), I have to support this guy's right to make software which might be used for spamming. After all, there's nothing wrong with BitTorrent, even though one of its major uses (perhaps its primary use) is distribution of pirated materials. Bulk mailers can have perfectly legitimate uses; it's not fair to blame their developers for what spammers sometimes do with them.

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!

Re:Spam software?

[Diabolical]

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.

Re:Step One:

[sg_oneill]

But your screenshots show 450,000 list members. Dude what legit mail list has 450,000 mail list members?

Overkill?

[skinfitz]

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!

Toni Arts has a worse problem

[Skiron]

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)

The 'Official' Toni Arts page now:

http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/index.ht m

and the unofficial 'ripped off' one:

http://www.toniarts.com/

If ever a site needs removing, it's that one :-(

Re:Step One:

[AssFace]

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).