The site was completely copied, how to close it?

Question

Copyright

The thing is this: In November 2014, our company ordered a site from a seemingly normal company, they did it for 50k. The site is a store that sells unique reference content. At the end of the site, we were offered promotion - 40k every month. We refused for now, because we still had to fill this site with content, it took 2 months. After 2 months, we saw that our site began to move well in search engines anyway. In May, they ordered a small upgrade of the site from the same developers, giving them all the requested passwords. A week after the upgrade, our site disappeared from the search engines - it turned out that someone got into our robots txt and turned off the promotion! The developers said they were competitors, and for 5k they fixed everything. For a month our site was being restored in search engines. Yesterday we accidentally discovered a site-copy of our site. Changed the design but the structure is the same some texts are slightly changed, but some texts are 100% identical, and in some of them these dummies haven't even changed the links to our pages. Naturally, they turned out to have all our paid unique content (it is absolutely identical) and they sell it, but the price is half as much. Someone in general copied our site, slightly repainted, our database was copied, all the functionality is one to one. We started checking the domain through huiz - some data came out, and lo and behold - the phone column contains the phone number of one of the developers with whom we constantly communicated. Of course, there were suspicions before, but they seemed such a serious company. We call them, while we don’t present anything, we just say we found a clone, the developer looked and said - “yes. some bad ones were completely copied, but the script that I used to create your site is the same. I can delete them.
today we hired a webmaster to monitor the site, he looked, said that we have a hidden advertisement on the site on a clone .... to strangle with your hands hunting podlyug right now, but you need to do everything correctly. don't know how, please advise. how to secure the site? how to delete a clone. what can these developers do to us (we changed the passwords), given that they created it. How to properly punish them, maybe someone had similar situations. ready to go to court. never encountered this. ask for advice.

Answer 1

If you had an agreement with a firm, then you can safely go to court, go for a consultation with a lawyer, and do not write here.

Answer 2

Competent web consultant + lawyer = court.
At the same time, you can claim damages in a large amount, more than you spent on the development of the site and its completion.
The studio is facing a real criminal term, and not just censure and removal of the clone.
But here, anyway, do not forget to look at the contract for development and revision.
And fraud and several other articles can be safely hung up, the main thing is a competent lawyer and a web specialist to help him (programmer + CEO). The minimum that they can be presented with:
1. Hacking the site with the creation of malicious actions that caused blah blah blah to the failure of the site in the proper amount. It's that they changed the robots.txt settings themselves.
2. Extortion of money to eliminate your hack - 5,000 rubles
3. Theft of the site (software + content), followed by blackmail for the destruction of the clone, with a price of 50,000 rubles. This is already quite a large amount for a term or a huge fine + a suspended sentence. At least for the theft of the software part, you need the advice of a lawyer, so that he would look at the development contract. To whom the rights are transferred after payment. To you completely or you, as it were, receive their property for rent. But blackmail of 50,000 rubles, in any case, criminally prosecuted. Proving the idea is not a problem.
Just p1 and p2 fit boldly, and if it's the fault of a legal entity, and not one freelancer programmer, that is, the office did it, then p3.
P1: ... if this act resulted in ..., ..., modification or copying of computer information,...
P2: The same act, ... committed out of selfish interest, ...
This can be safely referred to. There was a modification and the demand for money for the elimination of the modification. There was a copy and a demand for money for the removal of the copy.

Answer 3

Well, pure scammers. I won't be surprised if these are just intermediaries, other people do all the work for them.
On the topic of the question: to collect evidence and invite them to amicably cover up Koiyu. Don't pay extortionists.
To secure the current site and to engage in further development. Report the copy to the hoster, with supporting documents, of course.
By the cost of the site, it becomes clear - the chelas are offended that there was no promotion or there was a bigger kid. In general, you decide.

Answer 4

"yes. some bad ones were completely copied, but the script that i used to create your site is the same. i can delete them. but it's certainly risky... it will be 50k".

In my opinion, after this phrase it is necessary to put a curtain. If the site was not theirs, then this is already a scam out of the blue.
My opinion is that this is what happens when owners/managers have no technical literacy at all. In any case, you will encounter such situations if you do not understand web technologies at the level of understanding what is possible and what is not, what robots.txt is, etc.
For example, why you transferred all the content to the studio is not entirely obvious. Examples would suffice.
It is necessary to look at the contract with the studio, whether it says anything about the data. If not, it turns out that their data appeared on an equal footing, you handed it over at your own request.
As mentioned above, you need to show that your site appeared earlier. Maybe the webarchive will help, analytics data, screenshots of the site.