about search results that return a fraudulent copy suggesting that another existing business is your business.

Hi:
After extensive searching, to no effect, I decided to write you about what seems to be a new scam.

A competitor of ours has employed the services of an 'Optimization Service'. The result is that his formerly single page cookie cutter site, now through the services of this secondary Optimization Service has about 50 buried fake Home Pages involving non entities and about 13 actual competitors, ours among them. In fact, ours is something of a gateway because ours is the only actual business that comes up #1 on a Google search with his name and URL attached to our business. In other existing businesses searches his site may come up 3rd, 5th or 8th., also with him piggy backing = their name-his business name, in the search and across the top of the browser page.

(If you search Jessica's Taxi, you'll see what I mean.)

Btw, if anybody would care to set this thief up, please do record the conversation, and PRETTY PLEASE, let me know. Our actual web site comes in third beginning with "2007," due to another company trading on our LLC name. You'll see, and please don't hassle the Jessica's Taxi blog lady that has recently displaced us too:).

The really slick part is that these pages look like his legitimate Home Page in every detail but one: that being the body portion of the site's descriptive text is so small it cannot be read, or even determined to be text and live links so all one is left with his header(w/phone number), the left bar with services offered and of course the top of the browser page with our(or others) business name followed by his, indicating a business connection. If one happens to do as I did and enlarges the text, they find terrible copy and the often the blatant suggestion his organization owns your business.

It's really quite clever.

The worst of it is when I kindly attempted to entreat the young man, he laughed in our faces saying he wasn't doing anything wrong, and besides, it would cost us too much to stop him because he had nominal assets, so we would just be wasting our money(& it's looking like he;s probably correct).

Given the fact it seems Yahoo and Google don't have a Complaint Department, would you have any suggestions? I contacted his cookie cutter hosting service(wServe.com) and they suspended the page for about 3 days but it is back up now. I should add that when that page was suspended the fake Home Pages were still active although the Google search results disappeared, and of course have now returned.

Too, we're contacting our Attorney General's office tomorrow but after purusing Vermont's Computer Crimes Law(VSA), it doesn't appear there is a remedy. What say you.

sincerely, Mrs Nails(not my real name)
22July07

If your competitor used spammy methods you can file a spam report.

http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html