"Unique article" SCAM uncovered, heads up!

Hi folks,

I just uncovered a VERY sly article writing scam and wanted to tip people off. If I'm late to the party on this one then pls forgive me, but if it is new information then pay attention because it could be v important.

I just purchased some "100% unique" articles, not from someone on WF, but from another community (Fiverr). I guess I should have known better... but anwyay... I received them, and noticed they had some weird character encoding issues. When opened in certain softwares, they came up with lots of those funny square box characters. I complained to the seller, who said that they were in UTF8 and that my Mac wasn't set correctly, sent them in another format and I was good to go.

Articles seemed to be well written, human readable and unique: I copy-pasted a few phrases into Google and sure enough, no matches. Great! Then, I copied a couple of common words from the article into google. Zero matches. Weird.

So then I TYPED, instead of copied, a phrase from the article into Google and hey presto, my article is all over the web. It's word-for-word identical with 400+ other articles, I'm guessing they are PLR.

I had made other article purchases previous to this: I checked back at another of the sets of "unique articles" I received. This one opened perfectly in textedit with no bunk looking characters, yet was 'encoded' so that not a *single* word from the article could be found in google when copy pasted.............! And of course, when the words are typed manually into google, the article is everywhere. Also - this is important - the articles are not recognized by Copyscape, which is useless at telling if they are duplicate!

It appears that the "Unique article" seller is running the articles through some sort of "character set spinner", meaning that the article is unrecognizable to google even though the characters "appear" the same.

Doing a little research it might be a software called SpinChimp, I've seen their promo video and they claim to have an optional feature that alters the character set encoding so that the content passes for unique when it is not. //UPDATE there are actually a few softwares out there that are claiming this ability - a likely candidate is www.contenthurricane.com Notice how the "Content Hurricane" software seller is targeting craigslist spammers as his demographic!

This is a big problem, because not only is google going to get hip to it at some point, if they aren't already, but by the time the lid comes off, there will be a lot of people who think their content is unique, but actually it isn't and so at some point their sites are going to get slapped and they won't know why.

If your content is unrecognizable to search engines, it will have ZERO search engine optimization value....... though it will quite possibly leave a big "footprint" owing to the nature of the characters being used.

Not only this, but there are possible copyright ramifications - just because an article is encoded in a different character set, that doesn't mean it is unique content in the eyes of copyright law. If the articles are copied from copyrighted content, then the people uploading them are inadvertently performing copyright theft. To say that the articles are "100% Unique", as the article seller states in his headline, would seem to me to be actual fraud, an intentional piece of deceptive marketing.

Replicant spam? Indistinguishable from the real thing unless you have inside knowledge (specifically, that a cut-and-paste test no longer provides proof of uniqueness). Sounds like the perfect storm. I'm imagining that these garbage articles will spread through the system like a virus, some people will only have themselves to blame for copying junk, but others, thinking they actually have unique content, will take an unfair blow.

Anyway hope this is of help to the community! I think the word needs to be spread. Alex.

//UPDATE feb 6th - thanks for the feedback everyone, I've updated this report to include a few more things learned. Also, Rand Fishkin tells me he has fwd'd my alert to Matt Cutts of Google, though they may already be on to it, who knows what happens behind those doors?

Anyway it goes deeper on Fiverr, which is getting saturated with this: I just noticed that our dear article writer over at fiverr appears to have created numerous accounts and is currently scamming hundreds if not thousands of people; the offers are too similarly worded for it to be coincidence. I have been bleating on at Fiverr support but none of the accounts are being banned and I get the standard dismissive "thanks we will look into it" type responses. I don't think they have a clue what's going down. I asked them to push to management but so far no dice. Anyway here are 3 examples of the offers, what do you think... same person multiple accounts? Sure looks like it to me:

http://fiverr.com/phylix/give-you-5-...-your-choosing

http://fiverr.com/tacitinc/write-ten...of-your-choice

http://fiverr.com/article_content/wr...rious-purposes