This reminds me of an issue my sister is having with Etsy.
She runs an Etsy store with $1-2 million in annual sales, and her store keeps getting taken down by Etsy's automated copyright infringement system -- which keeps getting triggered by someone submitting fraudulent copyright claims and then immediately asking her to pay $5k/month in exchange for the person to stop submitting the infringement claims (in other words, she's being extorted).
Basically Etsy immediately takes down listings with no human review upon receiving a copyright complaint, which can be used by black hat scammers to extort stores into paying $5k-10k/month in exchange for the black hat to stop submitting fraudulent claims.
It's really astounding that companies build these automated systems that hurt their customers with no humans on standby to resolve these kind of edge cases (false positives).
If this extortion practice isn't a common curse of Etsy stores with her scale of revenue, I wonder whether it might actually be a competitor (who gets the sales and customers whenever her store is down).
What legal risk? You're a fly-by-night vendor outside Etsy's jurisdiction who can close up shop and have twelve new corporate entities by tomorrow morning.
It happens on Amazon, there was a post on here about it. I’m not sure they’d want to double dip and demand the hush money in that case, but it seems possible it happens on Etsy too.
Your sister should contact the FBI, as it is unlikely that she is the scammers' only target, and this crime likely crosses state (or international) borders.
No, the FBI is not precluded from investigating cross-border crimes. They just have to work with their foreign counterparts on the investigation.
And the amounts cited are not below the FBI's interest threshold; the whole point of my comment is that their are probably other victims, which makes this a larger crime than just the OP's system and probably involves sophisticated or organized criminals. This makes it exactly the kind of crime the FBI loves to investigate.
Only 4 countries (Micronesia, North Korea, Palau and Tuvalu) are not participants in INTERPOL, and criminal organizations generally don't operate out of them...
It might be too late now, IDK, but perhaps she could lie and tell the attempted extorer that she already pays another extorter and can't afford to pay two extorters at once, and if they keep taking down their store, she'll tell the extorter that she can no longer pay them because of them and do they want another criminal coming after them?
I’d love some info on how she grew to that size on Etsy. My partner sells some things on Etsy and has had moderate success but nowhere on that level. Did she use Etsy ads, off platform marketing, or some kind of listing optimization for Etsy search to drive that kind of growth?
From my understanding it's mostly organic, ranking well in Etsy search. I think she does paid ads to boost + supplement, but organic Etsy search is the primary growth channel. Which is also difficult and frustrating because you basically have to get really good at guessing what Etsy's algorithms are, which they change frequently (in other words, SEO but for Etsy). I don't think there's a magic bullet. A lot of trial and error
She runs an Etsy store with $1-2 million in annual sales, and her store keeps getting taken down by Etsy's automated copyright infringement system -- which keeps getting triggered by someone submitting fraudulent copyright claims and then immediately asking her to pay $5k/month in exchange for the person to stop submitting the infringement claims (in other words, she's being extorted).
Basically Etsy immediately takes down listings with no human review upon receiving a copyright complaint, which can be used by black hat scammers to extort stores into paying $5k-10k/month in exchange for the black hat to stop submitting fraudulent claims.
It's really astounding that companies build these automated systems that hurt their customers with no humans on standby to resolve these kind of edge cases (false positives).