Maxim Ali had shared with Vot-tak.tv Maxima Legal experience of fighting the St Petersburg Philharmonic Hall’s copycat websites

St Petersburg Shostakovich Academic Philharmonic Hall like many other cultural organisations in Russia, has faced a problem with its official website being impersonated by fraudsters who sell fake tickets for 10-20 times higher than allowed by law. At the request of the international online project Vot-tak.tv, Maxim Ali, Partner at Maxima Legal described how the firm`s IP/IT practice team headed by him helps the Philharmonic Hall to protect its interests.

The expert stressed that formally fake websites can be blocked by state authorities and court practice confirms this. However, upon analysis of the situation, it became clear that the same group of persons creates mirror sites for different institutions and, in case of problems with any of the resources, is able to restart it almost instantly with a new domain name.

“A more effective solution proved to be claiming work with the operators of the major search engines, which cleared the search and advertising output of fraudsters,” Maxim added, calling this measure temporary as well. There is no guarantee that fraudsters will not return to promoting their sites again, especially as each incident has to be contested manually – search engines are not yet ready to filter out duplicate sites automatically. “That’s why it pays to be careful when shopping online. Even a superficially similar site can turn out to be a ‘fake’. As a result, you risk not only overpaying for a ticket, but also losing personal and card data,” Maxim Ali summarised.

To read the full article (in Russian), please see Vot-tak.tv website >>>