What kind of company sells products by stealing the trademarked identity of its own main competitor?
No, this is not a trick question, and no, you don’t need an MBA from Harvard to figure out why a company would do this. Two answers. Their product is so bad it cannot be sold honestly or that the company is simply outright scammers.
In both cases, this company is deceiving you, the customer to get your money.
And this is exactly what we found mSpy doing on the newly registered flexispy.me domain.
A site designed specifically to deceive internet searchers into thinking that they were dealing with FlexiSPY.
There is no excuse for this. The deception is extensive, extending to the web page titles which all claim to be FlexiSPY.
It starts when you do an organic Google search for the term “flexispy”. This listing appearing at number two on the search page, just under the real FlexiSPY listing:
As you can see, only FlexiSPY is mentioned, and there is no mention of mSpy. The searcher looked for FlexiSPY, and the result says its FlexiSPY, when in fact its mSpy.
The deception continues when entering the mspy site. Note that all pages are titled FlexiSPY, including our brand capitalization of the word SPY, deliberately misleading visitors, as well as stealing our brand.
Crazy, isn’t it.
Now this happens to us a lot, after all we are the market leaders, and have been so for eight years. We have been used to Chinese and Turkish entities cloning our entire site simply to sell poor products, but this is the first time we have seen this behavior from a company that considers itself credible.
We used to think mspy were a genuine company, albeit it with less than stellar products, but this lack of integrity places mspy alongside the sellers of fake Gucci bags.
Imitation is the highest form of flattery, theft of internet searches using straight out lies to customers is quite something else
We’ve already filed a complaint with ICANN regarding a Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution (UDRP) decision, and requested mSpy to desist using our trademark name.
We have also contacted Google to have this site de-indexed for breach of copyright and we will keep you posted
We’d like to warn all customers to please be very careful when doing research online. Many sites pretend to be the real deal when in reality are as authentic as a Louis Vuitton knock-off from a back alley street market.
Finally, one must wonder what the marketers of mSpy must think of their own product, resorting to tactics like this for a profit.
For anyone who still thinks that this particular mSpy site is not a scam, then please check your spam folders for an urgent matter regarding an innocent ex-government official from a recently overthrown regime who is looking for a silent business partner to receive a wire of large sum of money.
If you feel that you’ve fallen victim to any SpyPhone scam then you’ll want to head over to our trade in program where we can set you up with a fresh FlexiSPY install, it’s really easy to do and it’s one way to recoup your losses
//–Update–//
mSpy have since given their FlexiSPY.me site a repaint. however, the deception they are practicing still remains the same. Guess a leopard can’t change it’s spots, huh.. Here’s a screenshot of their new and improved copy cat site.
We’ll keep a watch on these mSpy fella’s to see what they do next, we can only guess but we figure – based on experience- that it’ll be mSpy making some other attempt to further fool people into thinking that they’re actually genuine software.
//– Latest Update–//
mSpy contacted us on 29th January, explaining that the URL belonged to one of their affiliates and was not sanctioned by them. We did notice the URL was pointed to mSpy.me for a while, but now directs to google.com.
We thank mSpy for this action, because we ourselves have rogue affiliates that will do anything to make money. This is unacceptable, as it is not good for the customer, the company or the cell phone monitoring business as a whole.
mSpy and FlexiSPY are not the only ones to become a victim of deceptive advertising. This is very common, especially when it comes to spyphone product reviews. We openly run a review site, www.spyphonereview.com where we publish in depth testing of competitor products, but the web is full of fake review sites that are designed to deceive customers. This is not good for anyone, and we would like to ask for your help to protect customers.
One example of such a site is SpyAppsReviews. To be clear, we are NOT claiming that spyappsreview is deceptive, but their recommendations seem far fetched enough to merit a closer look. We are currently investigating such sites, to see if they are guilty of misleading customers and we will publish our results on spyphonereview. If you have any information about them, please post it here to help others.
APPENDIX
To try to understand what was going on, we contacted MSPY’s live support at the “fake” flexispy.me site, just to clarify who’s really on the other end. We left the formatting as is to show you the context in which the chat happened
