Paypal is good about shutting down pirate site accounts

7 replies
Hi -

Good news, I've had success in filing paypal infringement reports against forums/sites that try and sell pirated copies of my content:

https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?c...gementRpt_full

Here's what I do:
Step 1: Whenever I find a forum or site selling unauthorized/pirated content, I find out their paypal ID

Step 2: After finding out their paypal ID, I send in DMCA format, an infringementreport.pdf and screencaps to paypal.

Step 3: Paypal shuts down their account, so when people try and buy pirated content, it says "this account is no longer able to accept payments" from paypal.

I'm glad to see that shutting down merchant accounts, with proper legal/DMCA notices, is an effective way to stop piracy from the sites that sell illegal bootleg content. This paper trail is also effective when I forward it to law enforcement agencies (often it's called 'cybercrime' departments, in other countries' police departments, like Canada RCMP, or here in the USA), for criminal prosecution of pirates.

I'm told that occasionally forum/pirate site owners are shocked when the police show up on their doorstep to arrest them. Good thing there's state of the art proxy tracing IP/ISP tracking to help law enforcement agencies correctly hunt down and arrest pirates. They do get found; it's great to bring digital thieves to justice.

Also people who do illegal group buys of protected content can be tracked down and prosecuted, of course, via IP records on servers. I've got a zero tolerance policy for people who steal from me online. As should we all. Theft is theft, I like bringing them to justice.

-k

Look what's happening to the adult industry, with all the pirated content; if you don't protect your content, then your business may fold. Adult's a great lead indicator for online commerce, they're always ahead re info marketing trends, now they have to do webcams and other non-copyable formats to survive, due to all the unauthorized distribution of their content. That's a warning to everyone of us in other info-marketing niches.
#accounts #good #paypal #pirate #shutting #site
  • Profile picture of the author writeaway
    For all the flak paypal gets regarding 'frozen' funds (as if they would do this arbitrarily), Paypal is quite a solid service. Think about it-it is too big to mess around with the penny ante stuff some people charge it with. It's all about following the rules.
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  • Profile picture of the author Lloyd Buchinski
    Originally Posted by kencalhn View Post

    I've got a zero tolerance policy for people who steal from me online.
    And a lot of enthusiasm
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  • Profile picture of the author Rbtmarshall
    wait... most pirated content does not require payment, and many filehosts are overseas and usually ignore DMCA threats.

    It seems like you are not talking about the free sharing though.

    I could see this working on membership site's that require payments to share stuff they didn't pay for. Those people deserve to be punished. the free sharers not so much

    The profiting pirate deserves to pay, as you made them do here.

    good job going after those type.
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    • Profile picture of the author MP80
      Originally Posted by Rbtmarshall View Post

      wait... most pirated content does not require payment...
      Lol, that's pretty much what I was thinking. Hopefully Ken is not shutting down his own affiliates...

      Personally, I don't see the problem with file-sharing or whatever, but I can understand how it upsets some people. There is a big difference between that and actually selling the content though, and it is handy to know that Paypal will respond in those situations.
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      Before you do ANYTHING else in your day - do at least ONE thing that brings money into your business.
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  • Profile picture of the author Rbtmarshall
    It would be pretty good if Paypal shut Fiverr payments down. I see piracy going on there all the time.

    A quick browse from 1 minute ago:
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  • Profile picture of the author YasirYar
    That's great to know that you may now file complaints like that on Paypal. It gives people like us added protection.
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    • Profile picture of the author kencalhn
      right -- the filesharing sites all you can pretty much do is send DMCAs, which I've sent hundreds of over the years, and VEROs on ebay for pirate bootleg videos. The sites I'm talking about are mostly the proliferation of bootleg DVD sites, where they sell pirate copies of your DVDs for a fraction of retail; there's quite a few of those sites out there; almost all I've seen take paypal as main payment processor, so it's good to shut them down.
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