Monday, February 20, 2012

Owners of Twtter.com and Wikapedia.com Fined for Fraud

Website owners of Twtter.com and Wikapedia.com were fined $156,000. These resources duplicated web design and content from original valid sources and used as their own while charging users for use as well as misdirecting online users into winning a free Apple iPad.

This fine isn't big enough to affect the market or actual owners of valid websites but these copies fooled users into giving away money.

Given the factor that websites look alike, online users were fooled by being notified of winning a large prize (in this case Apple iPad) after which the user was requested to fill out a form sent through SMS. Each response sent by the user resulted in $2.3 charge on their bill.

A female consumer has filed a complained indicating that approximately $98 has been charged to her account. After a number of complaints special operations unit looked into the issue and closed down both websites and their domain names. As for the owners of these websites, they were fined and forced to return all money spent by users online.

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