Watch Your .NET !

Like many who run a business I Googled myself.  While that phrase sounds odd, it is actually a very healthy thing for a business to do. With one of the older domains around pages of results turned up. First search result was our website BertRoofing.com followed by Pinterest, Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, and most of the listings you would expect to find. As I went back a a few pages on the results I found less known listings. On about page six of the results I came across "BertRoofing.net " .

I assumed that the ".net" version of my website was someone named Bert in a different part of the country. Naturally I clicked on the link to visit the website. It was a very plain site titled "Bert Roofing" with a simple contact form and to my shock a local Dallas 214 telephone number!  I used Google once again to search the telephone number and it quickly pointed to one of my local competitors with a very different name.

Bert Roofing has been around for 25 years and we have worked hard doing things the right way to build our name and reputation and this guy was stealing it. After I shared this discovery at work, our Office Manager did some investigation and found that this same guy had done the same ".net" scam on Scott Roofing, Arrinington Roofing, and several other well established businesses that all show up well in the search engines.

With all these websites having the same phone number, how did this phone get answered? So we called. The phone was answered with mumbled words and "Roofing", the perfect generic answer.  We asked "Who is this?" and the reply was "Who did you call?"  The person answering the phone was deliberately evasive.

We immediately sent out "Cease and Desist" letters and emails as well as inform several other owners of the websites that were being scammed. We also informed Karen Fox, Executive Director of the North Texas Roofing Contractors Association, who then passed word of this to the entire associations membership.

We spoke with Christine Scott of Scott Roofing after she had spoken to the owner or the fake websites. She informed us that the explanation was that he was a victim of an unscrupulous SEO / Internet Marketer and had no knowledge of the fake websites. Our earlier phone call makes us think that explanation unlikely.

Within a few hours the fake Bert Roofing website was down as well as all the others. The problem was stopped but who knows how much business was lost before we found out about this. Every small business needs to look out for this and protect themselves.