Entire Blog Stolen When I Didn’t Renew Domain Name

  • Unknown's avatar
    sallywally2016 · Member ·

    I let the domain I purchased through WordPress expire and set my blog content to private in March of 2016 only to discover today that someone stole absolutely all of it including my face, my names, my words about personal experience of child abuse and breast cancer and depression, etc. I’m horrified. Really angry and frustrated and when I try to reset my blog here to be visible even though I can see my old posts in the dashboard it says ‘not available’ … which is going to prevent me from proving to Google that I own all of the content. What has happened to me and how do I fix it, reach an actual person at WordPress, etc.?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    sallywally2016 · Member ·

    By the way, you will have the same problem that I have when you try to see my blog on that link above. How can I, as the actual owner of the content, see the content in my dashboard but not be able to make the content public again or view any of it? This is ridiculous.

  • Unknown's avatar
    staartmees · Member ·

    I tagged this thread with modlook to get attention from staff. They have access to logfiles; they can check your story and see what happened.

  • Unknown's avatar
    sallywally2016 · Member ·

    Thank you. I just now was able to figure out how to make my old blog public again, but ALL my old custom settings are gone, including my menu, my header and header image (which is super weird that it’s not with the rest of my images). Which will make it harder to prove to Google and whoever else I need to that *even the logo* of the way that domain is presenting itself is stolen from my old domain/blog. But I did figure out how to make my old content visible, so other words and pictures are there again. Turns out, they’ve taken only my most popular posts and pages. (Did their homework on that one, I guess!)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Which site stole your content?

    You are posting here as the username, sallywally2016. This account was created in 2008 under the username mrstamararice. That username was changed to sallywally2016 in March 2016, and has been inactive ever since until someone, I assume you, reset the password around 17 hours ago and logged back in.

    The site you indicate, tamsoldblog.wordpress.com, was created by this account in April 2013 as hopefullyknown.wordpress.com. At that time this account registered two domains for the site, hopehappensblog.com and hopefullyknown.com

    hopehappensblog.com expired after a year and was removed from the site in June 2014, and hopefullyknown.com was cancelled on 23 March 2016 by your account.

    On the same day the domain was cancelled, your account set the site to private, changed the site’s free address to tamsoldblog.wordpress.com, and the logs show you also deleted a large number of pages and menu items at the same time. The logs also show you did an export of the site prior to deleting those pages.

    There has been no further activity on this site until 15 hours ago, when your account set the site back to public, changed the theme, and purchased a Personal Plan upgrade from us.

    Your account owns three other sites, and is a contributor on one more, but there is no evidence of any unauthorised access to your account, and no other user has had access to or made changes to your site since you set it to private in March 2016.

    If http://tamsoldblog.wordpress.com/ is the site you believe stole your content, it is not. That is your site, that you created in 2013, on which you had the hopefullyknown.com domain for three years, and which you set to private in 2016.

    If you’re speaking of another site, please give the address of that site so we can take a look.

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Okay, I see you’ve also contacted us via live chat, and there you specify that it’s the site that now appears at http://hopefullyknown.com/

    The only way that site could have your content is if they scraped it from your site before you set it to private, or else they copied it from the Internet Archive, at web.archive.org – the Internet Archive is a site that stores copies of public websites for posterity. Setting your site to private with us has no effect on copies of your site that might already be cached on services like the Internet Archive or with search engines.

    What likely happened is that your domain was picked up by a domain squatter after you cancelled it and it was released again, and then they went looking for the original site at that domain, scraped the content from a cached version, and recreated it for reasons only they will know.

    I’m certain this content was not obtained from our system after your site was set to private, though, as there had been no access to either your account or your site during this time.

    There is nothing we can do about this, though. That new site is not hosted on our servers, and the domain is not registered with us. From the public Whois data for the domain it appears it is now registered with a provider called http://www.onamae.com, while the site itself is hosted with GoDaddy.com.

    https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=hopefullyknown.com

    So your best bet to get that site taken down is to report it to GoDaddy – they are the only ones who have control over that site aside from the site owner themselves.

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