I’m sitting at my computer staring at a website that is exactly like Plum’s, although it’s not.
It looks like ours—all the same banners and pictures. It reads like ours—all the same headings and content. It sells like ours—all the same IVR products and services.
Except it’s another company’s. A fake.
Yesterday, our head of marketing was checking the Google rankings for our blog, IVR Deconstructed, and he came across a link with the exact same name for another company.
He clicked on it and found himself looking at an identical copy of our blog from a couple years ago (old format, old content). Somewhat alarmed, he clicked on a backlink embedded in the content (our content), and it led him to a home page that was identical to our own. Very alarmed, he clicked through the site—all the pages were the same as ours.
The site is for some company called Telesystem Operations – USA (based out of Croatia, not the U.S.). Turns out they totally scraped our website and are running it as their own.
“Yeah, I wrote this page,” our head of marketing said at one point.
I won’t tell you some of the other things he said.
You can imagine the reaction from the rest of the Plum team. A lot of us had contributed to the site and were personally offended at having these hacks scrape it. Plum has put years of hard work into our products and services, and it’s offending to think another company would try to cash in on that.
But much worse, it’s scary to think they might somehow negatively affect our good name with their shoddy products or services. (I have no idea how good or bad their IVR and surveys are, or if they even exist…I’m speculating.)
It’s just bazaar.
Tele-whatever didn’t even bother to change some things you’d think they would—like product names and some of the links, which still go to us. Not only is it blatant plagiarism, it’s a botched job.
It’s just bazaar. And yet true.
