The author is far more charitable in his characterization of the scammer than I would be. No one "accidentally" copies someone's website, and no one "accidentally" scams someone. And a person who does that is not a good person.
This is not a scam website. As I stated in my previous comment, we are having issues with our integrations with Coinbase. Because I have been out of the USA, they refuse to service my support tickets.
I am in the process of moving over to Bitpay, but I have not had the bandwidth recently to tackle that project so I have manually been entering in payments as I see them. As a result, the payments wont be registered for multiple hours.
Any customers that have not been happy with the service have been refunded upon request. I wish OP had contacted me directly about the payments not registering.
Glad to hear it's not a scam, but why did you steal basically the entire site content and concept from another website? How does that square with your 'law' #18. Don’t ever take credit for others' work. ?
I can see how scammers would abuse such a service but u should not be so quick to assume that that is his major customer base.
There have been numerous occasions where I was required to do SMS verification for legit accounts, and I didn't want to expose my phone number.
yes, but using bitcoin provides a layer of anonymity only fraudsters need. legit users who would just use twilio or another service that is tied to their identity.
Considering they mostly offer known VOIP numbers from twilio and likes and smsprivacy.org charges an UTTERLY INSANE $50 per day for physical numbers https://smsprivacy.org/buy-number/physical/GB I can't imagine them being too popular.
Sites like https://smspva.com offer you real physical numbers associated with real physical sim cards for a couple of cents.
We just had a clients website copied (a law firm no less). We filed a DMCA notice and the site was down within a day. It's a very powerful tool if your work has been copied, so long as the infringing site is in the US (our owned by a US hosting company).
It's a powerful tool if you are a law firm and your work is not very valuable, otherwise you will receive fake counter-notification from scammer and Google will ask you for court order.
How certain are you that it's the same person? How certain are you that the scammer isn't just picking a random scapegoat, and registering a domain in their name?
I agree about not doxxing, but the article points out that there is a link from this person's personal website to the "scam" site. So it's not just someone who's name was randomly used to register the domain.
Sure, unless their accounts were compromised, etc.
I know that the risk is low, and it likely is the person in the LinkedIn account, but regardless - that doesn't belong her on HN. We're not vigilantes; let the article's author and the legal system deal with it for now.
It seems like this was a project someone worked on during one of our trips in the past. While he's not scamming people, it does look like he copied the text from smsprivacy.org.
We don't have any connection to the project, but we've reached out asking him to change / delete the copied text. Hopefully this gets cleared up shortly.
Whois their IP and grab their Host/ISP. Contact their abuse address describing the IP theft. ISPs need to have well defined processes to deal with these complaints or they risk damaging their upstream relationships.
It doesn't work for real valuable IP because we don't have Internet court and even in obvious cases only real court can tell who is 'IP theft'. So creators have to spend a lot of time/money to prove obvious things while the scammer can change providers easily to DMCA resistant one.
This is not a scam website. I am using Coinbase to process transactions and their platform has had a host of technical difficulties for non-usa based customers. I have been manually updating payments for the last several weeks, such that there maybe a few hours delay between when transactions have been confirmed and when they are tracked on the website.
I noticed your payments several hours ago and I had already credited your account.
While my FAQ does say no refunds, I have always provided refunds when asked. You did not contact me about the payments not being correctly stored.
Would love to hear a timeline as well, AFAIK in these kind of situations they are normally included. It's not as bad if someone doesn't reply in 24h as if someone doesn't reply in 1 month.
"asking for the copied text to be removed, although I haven't received a reply and no longer expect to" => so you mean you lost all hope for an answer to your email within 3 hours? (;
The timing of all of this is rather unfortunate, because I am currently on a boat on vacation with limited wifi. I have updated the copy of the website and will continue to make changes to it in the near future.
You don't even need a working app or an original idea anymore to create an MVP. Just (literally) copy a competitor and do everything manually on the backend. When you make enough money you can pay someone to build it.
Interesting. I have a side project exactly like this. I created it after I saw the need for this myself. I've never bothered to check the internet for competing services, but this kinda motivates me.
"For Anonymous BTC SMS, I found my inspiration from a uk based sms provider on Indie Hackers. I chose this idea, because I have made several SMS based apps and I knew I could test this idea out pretty quickly. The owner of that app also does a poor job of SEO and marketing online so I knew I could get in front of the right people."
I am concerned when considering developing a simple client-application to do it server side or client side. If it's javascript someone could just copy your source code. I don't use any libraries/frameworks right now so it would just be pure javascript/no dependency.
I am thinking of building something and if I did it client side I could avoid potential attacks if I'm not mistaken as no server-side storage/execution is involved. But that concern of literally right-click save page and reupload...
The tool is a put-something-in get something out sort of deal and can be done entirely client side with JS.
Also doesn't seem like it's anything "amazing" or "revolutionary" I just wonder if it's so easy to steal... ehhh cross that road when you get to it.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadThis is not a scam website. As I stated in my previous comment, we are having issues with our integrations with Coinbase. Because I have been out of the USA, they refuse to service my support tickets.
I am in the process of moving over to Bitpay, but I have not had the bandwidth recently to tackle that project so I have manually been entering in payments as I see them. As a result, the payments wont be registered for multiple hours.
Any customers that have not been happy with the service have been refunded upon request. I wish OP had contacted me directly about the payments not registering.
I'm glad you're not ripping off your customers, though.
It's just a shame so much of your site is copied from mine.
> 8. There is nothing more critical to true success than openness, honesty and integrity.
> 18. Don’t ever take credit for others' work.
Yeah, I'm sure stealing other people's work makes you an honest person.
If some service demands my mobile number, that is a clear signal that I should not give them my actual mobile number.
Sites like https://smspva.com offer you real physical numbers associated with real physical sim cards for a couple of cents.
I know the poster mentioned that text was rearranged but based on the google description snippet text both appear different enough.
How certain are you that it's the same person? How certain are you that the scammer isn't just picking a random scapegoat, and registering a domain in their name?
I know that the risk is low, and it likely is the person in the LinkedIn account, but regardless - that doesn't belong her on HN. We're not vigilantes; let the article's author and the legal system deal with it for now.
<a href="Link.html" rel="nofollow">Link</a>
Possibly just a hackathon project that was never meant to have full functionality
Edit: contacted both him (though he was offline) and the group asking for more info
We don't have any connection to the project, but we've reached out asking him to change / delete the copied text. Hopefully this gets cleared up shortly.
This is not a scam website. I am using Coinbase to process transactions and their platform has had a host of technical difficulties for non-usa based customers. I have been manually updating payments for the last several weeks, such that there maybe a few hours delay between when transactions have been confirmed and when they are tracked on the website.
I noticed your payments several hours ago and I had already credited your account.
While my FAQ does say no refunds, I have always provided refunds when asked. You did not contact me about the payments not being correctly stored.
-Kevin
Thanks for the update, I'm glad to hear your site is legit!
I can confirm the payment is now credited in my account, although it wasn't at the time I wrote the post.
Can you please remove the text you copied from my site?
EDIT: I've added an update at the top of the article.
To me that sounds even more reckless than anything that site did.
WebAssembly can't come soon enough.
[0] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=761900.0
"For Anonymous BTC SMS, I found my inspiration from a uk based sms provider on Indie Hackers. I chose this idea, because I have made several SMS based apps and I knew I could test this idea out pretty quickly. The owner of that app also does a poor job of SEO and marketing online so I knew I could get in front of the right people."
I am thinking of building something and if I did it client side I could avoid potential attacks if I'm not mistaken as no server-side storage/execution is involved. But that concern of literally right-click save page and reupload...
The tool is a put-something-in get something out sort of deal and can be done entirely client side with JS.
Also doesn't seem like it's anything "amazing" or "revolutionary" I just wonder if it's so easy to steal... ehhh cross that road when you get to it.