Takeaways
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A UK farmer was scammed out of over $40,000 when he bought a used tractor from what turned out to be a cloned website. The French dealership’s site had been copied and a number of customers had fallen victim to the scam.
- Keep your website code up to date so hackers can’t access vulnerabilities with old or broken code.
- In many cases, whoever clones your site will leave all your internal links in place. This means you’ll get a sudden influx of low-quality links from an untrustworthy domain.
Fraud, unfortunately, is a problem as old as time. It can range from insignificant to life altering — and it can happen to anyone. I recently came across an article in The Northern Farmer, a UK publication, about a farmer who lost £30,000 (about $40,300) in what turned out to be a bogus tractor deal.
As Kate Fisher writes, “Richard Bennett, 61, who farms near Brentwood, Essex, believed he was buying a John Deere 6430 after spotting it online in January 2020. He transferred the money through his local HSBC branch, thinking he was dealing with a genuine French dealership.”
It wasn’t until the tractor didn’t arrive and a friend went to collect the tractor in France, that Bennett discovered the dealership’s website had been cloned, with the branding copied and the fake site was hosted in Panama.
The friend who had traveled to France for Bennett went with the invoice in hand. Turns out, he wasn’t the first person to show up at the dealership asking questions. “The people at the dealership said they didn’t know anything about it. It’s a family firm, and the lady there ended up in tears over it. They had other copies of these fake invoices where other people had had the same problem,” Fisher reports.
Skye Stockings, a lawyer at the National Fraud Helpline, said such scams are on the rise.
“This was a sophisticated scam that we are sure more farmers will have fallen foul of,” Sky Stockings, a lawyer with the National Fraud Helpline in the UK told Fisher. “We’re aware that there’s a big problem with farm machinery scams.”
She added: “Fraud in the UK rose by more than a third last year and the advent of AI makes it harder to spot.
Here are a few tips from Red Points, a firm whose SaaS solution helps combat counterfeiting, piracy, and brand impersonation, on how to prevent website cloning.
Maintain a Strong Legal Baseline
Your site should include copyright information and detailed terms and conditions that describe how people can use the site. This serves as your baseline for filing takedown requests and is what makes cloning a website illegal. Note that cloning a website without copyright protection isn’t necessarily illegal.
Use Technical Safeguards
You can implement security measures on your site to prevent certain bots from scraping your data. However, these guardrails can limit legitimate marketing or analytics services you might want to use. At a minimum, you should keep your website code up to date so hackers can’t access vulnerabilities with old or broken code.
Use Watermarks on Visual Media
Using watermarks won’t stop a site from being cloned on its own, but doing so can deter someone from stealing your images to use for scams or fake sites. A watermark can let someone know where an image originated.
Monitor Your Backlinks
In many cases, whoever clones your site will leave all your internal links in place. This means you’ll get a sudden influx of low-quality links from an untrustworthy domain. You should disavow these links in Google Search Console, but you should also investigate where they come from.
