This happened to me a few years ago (back in 2000) but I’d still like to know what to do if it ever happens again.
I had a very successful but low tech website. Just plain html and graphics. I was displaying products, descriptions, prices etc, and if somebody wanted to order they just sent me an email and we took it from there… like I said, very low tech but I was doing a LOT of business.
Anyway – I checked my server logs one day and I noticed a load of hits coming from a Madagascan website. No worries, a lot of my products (gems and minerals) were coming from Madagascar and I had a lot of friends and contacts over there, so I didn’t think too much of it.
Before I got around to doing any real investigation I had a really nasty bike accident and was out of commission for a couple of months (fractured skull, brain hemorrhage… you don’t want to know!) and so I forgot about it for a long while.
Much later, when I was regaining some sort of comprehension, I looked at the server logs again and saw thousands of hits coming from the same site and so I went to take a look only to discover that some bastard had stolen my site and was hot-linking to my pictures.
I don’t mean he copied my layout and copy – I mean he copied the whole site. Company name and all! The only things that were different were the URL and (of course) the order email address. God only knows how many customers and how much money he had managed to steal from me in the time it took me to discover him!
Anyway – I managed to trace his hosting company and had him shut down ASAP, but how could I go about prosecuting him? I didn’t know about things like whois lookups at the time and couldn’t identify who it was. Clearly a crime had been committed, but where did it happen?
I live in South Africa and created the site here, and then I uploaded it to a server in Canada. The thief copied the site in Madagascar and then uploaded to a server in America. He defrauded people all over the world by pretending to be me… so which government, police force or whatever should I have complained to? Where, geographically did the crime occur?
I realise that the chances of this happening again are pretty scarce, but if it does I’d like to know how to REALLY nail the bastard dammit!
