Well Richard I can tell you a bit, but whether you want to pursue this is up to you. These sites are part of a vast spider's web, pinning down a responsible person will not be easy and may well not be possible from where you are, anyway.

Nevertheless. The way these work is that someone starts up a site with a product range, and then offers to provide ready-made websites featuring that product range to anyone who wants to get in on the deal. Obviously the provider makes more than the client. Then the client can also offer "partnerships" to others and so on down the line. All of these businesses will look to be independent, will have different names and site designs, but the same product line. And profits from all will trickle back up the line, even though there's no legal liability being passed along with it.

Being that all these are online businesses, they are all subject to the laws of different countries and are likely selling into different countries from those where they are based. Additionally they will certainly have agreed, knowingly or otherwise, to absolve the people on the next level up from any comebacks. In some cases all they have to do is register the website, and someone else whom they never see does all the work of supplying the goods and pays them a commission per sale. In other words, it's an MLM scheme in which the person selling you the product is doing so on a commission and knows nothing about, nor distributes, the product itself.

In the case of this particular site, despite the records being masked to prevent detection of the registrant, tracking down who is behind it isn't too hard. However, I have to tell you that they aren't even in the same country as you, and although it's apparent that there is a connection between them and this business, there's no proof that I can see which ties them to the running of it or the ownership of the domain name. They have other and reputable businesses which appear to be unassociated with this site and with this entire type of selling, and you'd have to tread very carefully if you wanted to make any accusations of intent here.

I don't know any details of your particular situation but I can tell you that UK law defines internet transactions in the same way as it defines mail order transactions, and the laws are the same for both. You have an opportunity to prove, even though this business is trading from another country, that they did not state clearly that they were trading from there, and in that case, may be subject to UK law. However, there is some indication on the site that this is a foreign business, telephone numbers notwithstanding. The UK number given on the site, for instance, is an NGN (non geographic number) which can be routed to anywhere in the world without you knowing. The Help page gives a US number for customer service, only. It wouldn't be straightforward to show that the site might fall within UK jurisdiction. If not, then even if you can pin down a responsible person in the USA, or Canada, or wherever, they'll be subject to their own laws and you might have to fight a case there. And at the end of the day, you might pin down one affiliate whose responsibility stops there. You probably wouldn't achieve anything other than to get this particular site taken off the hosting service it's on now, for doing something against the hosting company's rules. It would then simply move to another hosting service. If the owner is imaginative, it's going to be a hosting service somewhere in Eastern Europe. Or the Ukraine, or elsewhere that trying to shut down illegal operations is a waste of effort.

Nevertheless I don't know you or your powers of influence or the limit of your resources or determination. You could get this site down in a week, if the host agrees that it is operating illegally in the location that it is trading, and if the hosting agreement includes a condition allowing the host to take it down unilaterally. Even that's not a certainty; this one is hosted on a dedicated server and web hosts are known to include conditions of use that exclude them from any responsibility for what their tenants do.

asked by Chris O. on 4/17/11