If you visited the websites for Reed College and the University of Redwood, you'd notice that they look uncannily similar. In fact, they look nearly identical, save for the names.
Which one belongs to a real educational institution and which one is just a fake website intended to defraud prospective students?
The WSJ reports that staff at Reed College in Oregon recently discovered that their school's entire website had been ripped off by someone. The copycat site was nearly identical to the real thing, except that any mentions of Reed College were changed to refer to the University of Redwood.
Imagine how surprised Reed College staff members were to find everything from their site — right down to their faculty pages and photos — listed on the Redwood page!
They're currently fighting to get the copycat site removed because of concern that there's a malicious scheme behind it:
Officials at Reed suspect the site is part of a scheme to collect application fees from prospective students in Hong Kong and Asia. After collecting a fee, "a shrewd scammer could wait several weeks, then issue a rejection letter, and the student would never know," said Martin Ringle, chief technology officer at Reed.
Unfortunately, so far no one's had much luck in getting rid of the University of Redwood site permanently:
After Reed officials complained, Go Daddy, a web-hosting company that houses the University of Redwood site, briefly shut it down. But a Go Daddy representative said the site was re-enabled once Go Daddy ascertained that the "allegedly infringing material was removed."
But [Reed staff] said the infringement continues unabated, as will Reed's legal effort to shut it down.
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Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She may be obsessed with Twitter, but still loves to be liked on Facebook.
