Bitcoin Forum

Can we stop the fake bitcointalk clone websites? When googling for a topic I accidentally clicked on this fake bitcointalk.to link. It's very easy to do if you're not careful.


This ad ridden clone site is what I arrived at.

https://i.imgur.com/vFWK5Y8.png

Sooner or later one of those clone sites is going to start stealing bitcoins unless they are shut down.

These are mainly bad. There is some good in them, though. They can be used as a sort of archive. Because of the scraped content, some deleted/edited posts may still be on that parallel site and so you can use that to potentially bust alternate accounts.

---

Think of it as if there was no Trashcan section and everything was available.

How long will it be until someone gets infected with a virus from one of those sites? Bitcointalk members make good targets for such attacks because they are likely to have bitcoins on their computers.

What is your suggestion? How exactly would we "stop the fake bitcointalk clone websites"?

Some are legit, and as far as i can remember some of these clone sites of bitcointalk are acutally used to mirror bitcointalk's content to people in China, a country in which bitcointalk is blocked due to the great firewall.

But others are malicious... You can't really stop it though, you just have to raise awareness.

Since bitcointalk accounts can have value and reputation, never log into your account without checking that the site you're on is actually bitcointalk and not a phishing site for your password. Also be suspicious if you click on a link, and all of a sudden you're asked to enter your password again(session expired, etc.). I've seen some of these phishing sites and almost fell for one myself.

Tch, what do you want people to do about it? You can't hold people's hands with phishing sites. There's always going to be more, like the heads of a hydra. Chop one off and two more grow.
It's not like you can just prevent BCT mirror and/or phishing sites from popping up. There's just no feasible way of controlling them.
Best way to deal with things (on your end) is to use a password manager: that way if it's the wrong site you won't even be able to log in.

Correct.As I was thinking of the ways how these mirrors could be used  positively,didn't take me much time to figure out!
Here's a case where a sold account deleted their posted addresses from bitcointalk but it still existed on the above mentioned mirror which help me find their alts.Detailed connection mentioned here :
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2544574.msg28452206#msg28452206

This is just one of the ways they can be utilised.

I don't see the harm in these clones. They provide you with a means of archive and to read the forum when its down(this keeps on happening a lot of times).

Also, regarding the threat of being phished, if you click on the login part of the clone then you'll be able to see on Google captcha saying "ERROR for site owner:
Invalid domain for site key" . This basically indicates that the site was not intentionally made for the purpose of phishing and hacking into accounts, it could have been made solely for the purpose of keeping an archive or for displaying ads.

However, why was advertisement of stake.com being displayed on the .to website? Are stake.com even paying the clones to display their ads on clone forums?
Also, OP , please remove the link to the direct .to website as someone might actually click it unknowingly, just place it under [ code ]

I asked stake about this and am awaiting a response. I suppose it's possible that they're unaware of it or didn't pay them directly and are using a third party advertising service to put their adverts on bitcoin related websites.

Doubt that stake knows that their advertisements have been placed on bitcointalk.to, especially when they already have advertising on bitcointalk. It's probable that they use a third party advertiser that submits their ads to crypto related sites, and thus appearing on bitcointalk.to.

But it's really not a problem, this. The main problem is still the phishing sites.

Perhaps show the link that people are redirected to every time someone PMs or posts on this forum a hyperlink. Or we could filter out the obvious phishing links by doing the [suspicious link removed] thing.

That is a good idea. I have seen a number of people inadvertently link to the .to site. It doesn't help that Google sometimes ranks it above the real one.

Search for whoever hosts the site and make a copyright infringement complaint.

The bitcointalk.to site is hiding behind cloudflare, so you fill out a copyright infringement complaint here.

https://www.cloudflare.com/abuse/form