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A friend reports that searches for the name of the non-profit organization she works for are landing on a porn site. There's some not so subtle extortion involved, as I'll explain. I'm trying to figure out how to help the organization get the quickest action, and I'd love to nail the scum who are doing this.
The whole affair is also one more warning about the kind of thing that people will do to you on the Web if you're not careful, and also, I feel, about the possible dangers of slow indexing and pay for inclusion. I'm hoping it's OK to post the urls, etc, here. They've been cleared by the organization.
Earlier in the year, the non-profit, which is the Portland Creative Conference, changed its domain name from [url snip] to [url snip] , not realizing what could happen if they simply let the old one expire. Lots of documents and pages pointing to the old domain were left online. "The really bad news," my friend writes, "is that the expired domain name was quickly picked up by some Mafioso types which pointed the name to a porno site. They are holding the name for $550 ransom."
A search for "Portland Creative Conference" on Inktomi, Excite, or AltaVista returns the old [adult url snip] pages, which are either cloaked or redirected to the entrance page to a porn site that now offers to sell the domain for $550. The organization is especially troubled, as a lot of students search for their site... and they're thinking of buying back the domain.
My guess is that the pages on Excite and AV are probably left-overs, but on Inktomi could either be left-overs or Position Tech pages... and, with cloaked PPI pages, the domain in fact would really have nothing to do with it. The folks who are doing this could in fact optimize PPI pages for an organization's name using cloaked pages and keep extorting a fee. I think the only thing that gets them to stop is that the victim thinks it's all about the domain, and on slow-to-refresh engines where residual pages are sitting, that's probably the case to some extent.
One word of caution re going further than the entrance page to the porn site... they play with your browser a lot... not just pop-ups that won't go away, but also full-screen browser windows, etc... The ENTER link takes you to:
[adult url snip]
Anyone know who these people are?
Interestingly, the scam has the organization thinking that since these guys own the domain they may have a right to do this. My feeling is that these guys have appropriated the organization's content and put it on a misleading website, which is to say they've committed copyright infringement plus spamming the search engine for fraudulent purposes and misrepresentation using the organization's name... with a clear enough case of extortion, I think, to get them in trouble. But with whom???...
I suggested that someone from the organization contact Inktomi to rectify the situation, at least on that engine, and... guess what?... Inktomi sold them a "subscription" to list their new domains. Great help.
Anyway, I'm looking for thoughts...
(edited by: littleman at 4:41 am (gmt) on Aug. 30, 2001(edited by: littleman at 4:45 am (gmt) on Aug. 30, 2001
(edited by: littleman at 6:16 am (gmt) on Aug. 30, 2001
I did dig out some information on it; I'll see if I can find it, if I still have it. Also, someone put up a web page about it that seemed to have gotten some attention. I'm not sure whether it was a legal authority or the press that ended up involved.
There hasn't been anything mentioned lately, so I'll drop a line to the webmaster who manages the organization's site (and the mail list) and see if I can get any current information.
What I'd like is responsive search engines, but then they get put in the middle... and of course, with all of them losing money right now, this isn't a good time to ask for more and smarter support.
Interesting idea about going to the press... for the long term, that is... but it would have to be the right writer. I'm wondering whether the tech writers would get it right. There are a lot of issues... technical, legal, and business.
The immediate problem is getting the redirect or cloaking removed, or the pages removed from the index. I hate the thought of paying these guys money... and yes the non-profit is doing badly in the current climate too.
Marcia - Thanks... would very much appreciate that information.
Littleman - I understand the URL situation... I was wondering out loud about it when I posted. At least now we know what happens when two people are editing the same message at the same time. :)
