scammer stole my rental apartment photos , need help

Hello,
I heard about your website and appreciate what you guys do and I was wondering if you had some advice for me. For a long time I have helped the woman I tutor for ( I am American but live in Florence, Italy ) find renters for an apartment she owns. normally i use sites such as craigslist or italians ones like mioaffitto.it to post the apartment and its been easy so far.

what tipped me off that something was amiss was when some italians contacted me through facebook to ask me if I really was Georgette selling an apartment they saw online. I was really confused until I saw that someone had stolen the photos and the description of the real apartment postings that I put up and put them online as "for-sale" at the same address and using my name. He was using the email [email protected] and claiming to be me. Besides the FREE listings they had put up , I saw the apartment here on this site http://abroadimmocenter.com/?p=596 which is what I think is a scam real estate agency site. The link takes you to the apartment that I am referring to. I contacted the site administrator to take the apartment down and they asked for a form of ID so they could tell I was the real Georgette Jupe, i sent them a copy of my drivers license and italian Id ( no passport ) and a copy of a mock contract for the apartment and a link to the actual REAL apartment rental posting. Then they said that the the other person, the one I am guessing is the scammer , had provided ownership documents for the apartment ( impossible ) . I got the owner to also send them emails and finally the said they would take the apartment down from their site. They obviously still haven't which is why i am contacting you. What recourse can I take? Any advice would be appreciated! I have the emails that me and the site administrator passed back in forth if you would like to take a look.

thanks in advance again!

First of all, do NOT send anything else to the website or contact them again.

The website itself appears to be fake, created by thieves, so everything you send to them just gives them more fake information to use. As you can see from the registration info below, the site was registered last month, for the minimum period of a year--typical of scammers who don't expect their sites to be around for long. They have no intention of taking anything down, because the whole site is a scam. They mentioned ownership papers, because they were hoping to trick you into providing a copy of the real ones, which would make them more dangerous.

In this case, the best course of action is to get the website itself killed. Some of our website killers will get the ball rolling. It will help us to gather the needed evidence if you can provide of the emails you have had back and forth with them, including at least one with headers. Normally I would recommend posting them here, but because of your connection to the actual apartment, I recommend you forward them by email to help protect your privacy. You can send them to the email address in my signature line, and I will pass them on to a site killer.

These scammers now have photos and some information, and unfortunately there isn't anything you can do about information they already have, but for the future, you can prevent other scammers from doing the same thing by watermarking the photos with an email address you own, so that when the scammers try to use the photos with a different address, it will alert potential buyers that something is wrong.

Domain Name: ABROADIMMOCENTER.COM
Registrar: DIRECTI INTERNET SOLUTIONS PVT. LTD. D/B/A PUBLICDOMAINREGISTRY.COM
Whois Server: whois.PublicDomainRegistry.com
Referral URL: http://www.PublicDomainRegistry.com
Name Server: NS10.LOVINGHOSTING.COM
Name Server: NS9.LOVINGHOSTING.COM
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Updated Date: 06-jul-2011
Creation Date: 06-jul-2011
Expiration Date: 06-jul-2012

yeah I certainly will not be emailing them any more info and regret even sending one document. I will forward the emails of our correspondence to your email. thank you so much! you have no idea how this has plagued me

The website for Immo Center is a fake and has been reported to our resident sitekilling moderator Michael.
It was registered on the 6th July this year.

There is no information for contact and the images claiming to be the office have been altered and used previously on another scam site.




Edit: Ninja'd by Dotti

Site is offline

thank you so much! I saw that today! what do you guys suggest i do when I see the apartment posted on various free sites online?

Apologies if this sounds negative but I don't think you can do much.. The pictures are part of a scammers tool kit and if you find one there may be a hundred others you don't find. In some time the pictures may get lost or out of date and if you still want to use them then do as advised and overprint them. I use a free program called Gimp 2 to handle all my photos and it comes from Sourceforge. It is fairly easy to use and you can add text boxes to a photo and write inside them. I am afraid there are so many photos around used in scams. Ask Robert Frost/racing driver or James Bill/Focus Hawaii model about identity theft. We have this everlasting problem easily discovered in this site and it never goes away.

You may want to google the information you gave them periodically to see if they are using it somewhere on the internet . Use the paranthesis " " to narrow the search . IE

" name name "

" 123 Any Street , Anytown "

thats what I have been doing, i have seen it crop up again on the free classifieds from time to time.. grrr... but seriously this website is awesome!!!! I feel so much batter after talking to the admin
s here and getting that fake website killed

Just report those new fake sites here.