Help! Someone cloned or copied my website

This morning I looked at my referral traffic and one of the sites I did not recognise and went to look at it, the website is using my theme and basically imported a whole bunch of my content, photos, sliders and even contact forms. I do remember awhile back I noticed plugins such as wp clone or wp migrate and deleted them immediately. Can someone please tell me how this is possible and what to do now? It looks like they are still setting up the theme and the contact form on their website is coming to me.

So if I understand correctly they have stolen all your content. If this is the case you can file a DMCA with Google here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard/

If the theme they have stolen is one you made yourself then you can contact them directly tell them to remove it and if they don't you can speak to their hosting company and you might be able to get it taken down.

It happened to me once. Someone from African country cloned my whole website. I checked their who is and sent them a DMCA email, threatening them with these things:
- Complaint with the web host
- complaint with Google.
- Complaint with legal authority in their country.
- Also added large amount of money as compensation.

They removed all the cloned pages from their server in 48 hours.

I created an email '[email protected]" just to send that email.

Did you check with your admin password for the specific domain whether it's not easily predictable. I had one of my parked domain hacked recently. I left a default easy password for that one, my bad.

There are a lot of site rippers out there, probably they were used to do that. It is a common thing in affiliate marketing, people ripping some third person's pages when they feel it is converting well!

You can disavow them and Complaint with DMCA through WP dashboard. The DMCA from Google are really fast and you can easily remove them.

Depending on the country, I would contact my lawyer. Some good, stress-free, extra income ;-)
If it's just an article, that's probably just 200- 500 USD in compensation..but for a whole website, the sky ( or rather your real income) is the limit.

I would explicit not contact them myself.

If it's a chinese or african website, I wouldn't bother to hire a lawyer and rather do what everyone above recommended. But for Europe or US..definitely the lawyer - even if it's just a single picture on instagram. You can destroy some competition and gain easy money. win-win for you.

xinga said:

Depending on the country, I would contact my lawyer. Some good, stress-free, extra income ;-)
If it's just an article, that's probably just 200- 500 USD in compensation..but for a whole website, the sky ( or rather your real income) is the limit.

I would explicit not contact them myself.

If it's a chinese or african website, I wouldn't bother to hire a lawyer and rather do what everyone above recommended. But for Europe or US..definitely the lawyer - even if it's just a single picture on instagram. You can destroy some competition and gain easy money. win-win for you.

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Wow going ballistic on someone is somehow too much, just a DMCA will do.

febday said:

Wow going ballistic on someone is somehow too much, just a DMCA will do.

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You wouldn't be saying that if it was your livelihood being stolen.


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febday said:

Wow going ballistic on someone is somehow too much, just a DMCA will do.

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haha...how is that going ballistic...it's the last stressful and most profitable way.

Besides, this is business. Your competitors broke the law and why would you want to be easy on them? So they can do it again? Cuz you really don't care about the money/reputation you lost through their action. Might as well give them access to your bank account.

I am aware there are a lot of kids around here who think copyright infringements are a fun way to earn an easy buck on Instagram. They are more than welcome to do it. I mean it - we are on black hat world, after all.
But see, don't begrudge me my right to earn an easy buck from all those kids in return. It might be nicer to write an e-mail...but you see...I, at least, am not here for upping my karma.

To give you an example. Some moron used one of my articles on his fishy website two weeks ago. Sent the details over to my lawyer. Yesterday I go his declaration to cease and desist, he had to pay all the legal expenses (a bit over 1,2k) and I got 500 bucks as damage compensation. It was 15 minutes work, all put together.

gutterleech said:

It happened to me once. Someone from African country cloned my whole website. I checked their who is and sent them a DMCA email, threatening them with these things:
- Complaint with the web host
- complaint with Google.
- Complaint with legal authority in their country.
- Also added large amount of money as compensation.

They removed all the cloned pages from their server in 48 hours.

I created an email '[email protected]" just to send that email.

Click to expand...

This sounds reasonable to me. There you go, OP.

-ThopHayt