Unknown entity made a free WordPress Site and included our Address/Phone/email
-
Hello Everyone,
I hope you are all doing well. I am seeking urgent assistance with an issue that has taken considerable time to resolve.
My name is Travis, and I’m the Marketing and Digital Operations Director for a Legal eFiling Service Provider (EFSP) MyFileRunner (https://myfilerunner.com). If you need to file legal documents in Texas, California, or Illinois, you can file them through our application, or we handle the process for you, ensuring your documents are accepted by the court for a low flat fee. This service is invaluable for solo practitioners and pro se individuals.
As the Director of Digital Operations and Marketing, I recently discovered a free WordPress site, “myfilerunner.wordpress.com“, which uses our company name, address, phone number, and support line. This site discredits our company and impacts our potential partnerships. Despite efforts to contact someone for its removal, we have had no success. Based upon my consistent monitoring of this illicit and horrible looking duplicate site, it appears that it has not been updated for some time, suggesting it may have been abandoned.
We have been advised that trademarking our logo and company name, a process currently underway, might help, but this process takes a significant amount of time (We were quoted around a year). As we all know, time is the most valuable asset we have in life. We urgently need assistance from anyone with administrative privileges to either make this site private or prevent it from being crawled, allowing it to disappear from search results over time. I understand trademarking, however our CURRENT address and other company information is posted throughout the front page of this illicit site. The real MyFileRunner has been in operation for over 20 years, since the very inception of e-Filing!
If any Directors, Moderators, or Admins can assist me with this, or direct me to someone who can, it would be GREATLY appreciated. This issue is impacting our company’s growth and revenue, which directly affects our employees and their families. This matter is extremely urgent, and has been placed upon my shoulders to resolve. I would be more than happy to discuss this matter with someone who works for Auttomatic or WordPress directly to provide additional details.
Thank you for your time and understanding.
<strong> <h2>Best Regards,</h2> <h2>Travis Hodges</h2> </strong> <h3>Director of Marketing & Digital Operations</h3> <a href="https://myfilerunner.com"> <img src="https://myfilerunner.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/logo-dashboard-cropped.png" alt="MyFilerunner Logo" width="200"> </a>The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
-
Hey Travis!
I’m sorry to see you’re having a hard time because of this, however, we’re all here to help. When it comes to fake websites promoting a particular brand or product, these can be reported through the “Report a site” feature. We also wrote a guide on how to do so here:
If you find a site that violates our User Guidelines or Terms of Service, we want you to let us know about it. Please understand that we don’t always respond to these reports, but every single one is read (by a real human being), and the reported site is reviewed accordingly. More importantly, please note that the team behind WordPress.com strongly believes in freedom of speech. WordPress.com hWhen filling in the form, you should pick the “Spam” and “Copyright” option, and my team will review this carefully and get back to you.
Should you need any more details or have more questions, we’re available and happy to assist!
-
the blog I need help with is:
@robertghetau Pardon my misunderstanding, but for that line to appear in the OP, doesn’t the poster need to have access to that site? Thanks for any insights.
-
Thank you for asking!
In short, no, the user that reports this doesn’t need to have access to the website. Anyone can report a WordPress.com website or content from a website if they believe that is stolen or if there are any other copyright issues with it.
-
@2020testjj Did the above answer your question or did you mean something else? ie: I always thought that the last line in the OPs post was automatically created by WordPress.com to indicate what was the main site connected to the account posting the questions (unless they ticked something to ask that it was only visible to staff). I’m sure that was how it worked in previous years and it was useful for volunteers.
Is that no longer the case? When people submit a question there must be a field where they can input whatever URL they want displayed there??
-
I’m sorry to hear you’re dealing with this, Travis. It sounds like a trademark infringement. While trademarking your logo and company name can help in the long run, there are steps you can take to get the infringing site taken down more quickly. You can also try contacting the web hosting provider of the infringing site directly.
-
@robertghetau @themagicrobot That was my understanding as well (about the address line appearing in the OP’s post). However, since it appears that this request went through the forum “add new topic” form (since the appropriate tag is missing), apparently it’s possible to add an unconnected site there as well.
my 2¢/TBH, initially the post read to me too much like an advert rather than a support request and we’ve had such “support requests” in the forums previously./my 2¢
@arnoldmatt700 you mentioned:
You can also try contacting the web hosting provider of the infringing site directly
That’s what they did. :)
-
- The topic ‘Unknown entity made a free WordPress Site and included our Address/Phone/email’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 