I was looking into getting some ebooks so I googled around a bit and something came up that was offering a nice deal. In fact, it was so nice that a little warning indicator popped up in my brain. It was looking a bit too good to be true, you know, the typical signs of a scam: if it’s too good to be true, it usually is.
Then I read the conditions and apparently you had to pay upfront before you could buy a book. Hmm. More warnings popped up.
So how do you determine if a site is a scam? Well, googling the name might help and turn up some warnings. But it didn’t in my case. That search however did turn up one thing by chance. A site that calculates the ranking of this ebook scam site gave me links to similar sites. When I opened one of them, it turned it had the same layout. In fact, it was a clone of the original site hosted on a different domain.
Scam?
So how many more domains like that are there? I tried a few google tricks and finally struck gold by copying a line of text from the site’s privacy policy, surrounding it with quotes to have The Google search for that exact piece of text. If that line is unique enough, it should only turn up a single website. Or websites that copied the same text. Or complete clones of the website as in this case.
The result? Google turned up a huge list of sites hosting the exact same content under a ton of different domains, sometimes with a different layout theme or logo. But plain copies none the less.
Scam!
Picture by Alex Abian, cc-licensed.