How Do I Fight Russian Site Cloners? 208
An anonymous reader writes "I used to run a small web design service, the domain for which I allowed to expire after years of non-use. A few weeks ago, I noticed that my old site was back online at the old domain. The site-cloners are now using my old email addresses to gain access to old third-party web services accounts (invoicing tools, etc.) and are fraudulently billing my clients for years of services. I've contacted the Russian site host, PayPal, and the invoicing service. What more can I do? Can I fight back?"
Close your accounts! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:ICANN (Score:5, Interesting)
Excellent idea! If you file the claim, the scammers have to file a reply, or they lose by default. Since people like this are bottom feeders who move from one scam to another, I seriously doubt they'll want to expose themselves by filing a response. Like cockroaches exposed to a light, they'll scurry away.
Re:ICANN (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:contact your clients (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with this is that the scammers can send just out another mail calling him the scammer and 'reassuring' the customers that everything is okay and keep the money flowing. Who are they going to believe, originalguy@gmail.com or admin@originaldomain.com?
He needs some way of proving who he is. He may have to resort to calling each customer directly to convince them, perhaps by referencing details of their relationship and past transactions that the scammers shouldn't know.
Re:contact your clients (Score:3, Interesting)
The principal of what girlintraining said stands, if you want to solve the problem you have to follow the money. The fact that this would likely require international police cooperation to resolve is moot. Police agencies work together on this kind of crime on a routine basis, it's just a question of where the jurisdiction falls.
I used to work large balance fraud for a living, I could research a case, find the victim, find the perp, find all the aliases and their addresses, determine what was real, gain collaborating evidence from other fraud victim companies and be on the phone with the secret service with everything they needed to prosecute the case - and I typically did all of this in less than 15 minutes. While your chain of events isn't that far off, remember that for the people that solve this type of crime, it's what they do every single day.
For example many scams like this used to be initiated in Romania, and then Romanian authorities started cooperating with outside police agencies. It's a bit of a game of a whack-a-mole, as scam artists pick different host countries. All that being said, there's no voodoo in solving this type of crime, the only voodoo is working through jurisdictional issues.
The thing this person needs to do is report the crimes to the appropriate police agencies for their jurisdiction. They can then forward a copy of their police report to their former clients in an attempt to save their reputation. You gain points for trolling, but lose them for hyperbole.