Ask HN: As an indie developer, how can you fight fraud?
I'm the developer of Rectangle [1], a FOSS window manager for macOS, and its paid version, Rectangle Pro.
This past year, someone created a fraudulent site[2] that has gained enough traction to rank on the first page of Google search results for my official site. Users have started falling for the scam, and are buying a cracked version of my paid app.
It would appear that my only recourse is to report the fraudulent site and associated accounts to each of their services (registrar, Google Safebrowsing, etc), which I have done. Unfortunately, there is no result from this, and I've started to try to get my users to also report it [3].
Is there anything else I can do? Does anyone else have a similar experience where they were successful?
[1] https://rectangleapp.com
[2] rectanglemac(dot)com
[3] https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle/discussions/969 Quick update that the fraudulent site has indeed been suspended. This restores some confidence that things can happen with reporting, and I think it just took more people reporting it to finally get a result. Not really specific to "as an indie developer." One of my customers who sells aviation products online had this happen -- entire site cloned with his photos and a checkout process that collected payment through Stripe. Reporting to the fake site's domain registrar got the fastest result -- domain suspended within an hour. It looks like you might have done that because rectanglemac shows suspended to me. As for fighting fraud, good luck. My customer's site was jacked by someone in China according to the domain registration info (whois). Not much you can do about it other than report it. Thanks for the reply! For some reason I don't see rectanglemac as being suspended, but if it really is, then that would be great. Good to know that you've seen success going the registrar route. From what I've read online, NameCheap (the fraudulent site's registrar) appears to have a reputation for a lot of criminals using their service, so I've been skeptical that I'll get results from that route. [2] is Suspended for me. :-) Did you try to send DMCA request to google search https://support.google.com/legal/answer/3110420?visit_id=638... I did not, but will definitely do this if I hit this problem again (thanks for the link). I had reported it to the Google safe browsing pages multiple times over the past month and that had no effect, but going that legal reasons route seems like a better bet.