Scammers are adept at putting up websites quickly, often with pirated content. A work-at-home scam that Chris and I exposed last year rested on a pastiche of such content, including photos of the entire Opera software team, rechristened with made-up names to give the appearance of a stable company. This morning I came across another such site, ArticlesWorld.com.
Rather than an employment scam, ArticlesWorld is an ad-driven site, attracting traffic through what appears to be a wide selection of stolen intellectual property -- hundreds of articles, written by experts from all over the Net. The catch? The experts' names have been eliminated, and the pieces are now attributed to "Tolik," "Admin," etc. (Whoever they may be -- and we'll get to that in a sec -- they deserve a Pulitzer for prodigious productivity!)
I discovered Articles World this morning, when a Google alert came in with the title of a piece that Chris had written some time ago, "Virtual Careers / Self-Employment -- Self-Assess or Self-Destruct." Clicking on the link, I found her article at AW, with Chris' name replaced by "Tolik."
I won't go into a full-blown analysis of the site and the miscreants here, but a check at Whois shows that the domain was registered in 2004 to a gentleman named Ihor Hasyuk, whose address is given as Lukasha 5, in Lviv. Who lvivs in Lviv these days, you might well ask. I don't know; it's in Ukraine. (Compete.com estimates 15,000 unique monthly visitors to AW; not a lot, but a good toehold, with traffic on the upswing.)
How to rectify all this? Well, we'll see. FWIW, I'll email Ihor (Whois gives his email address as on5bg@yahoo.com, though that could lead anywhere, or nowhere), and take it from there. In the meantime, if you've posted any articles to the Net in the past few decades, you might want to see if your new name is Tolik, too.
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