No one likes to see their hard work stolen and used for someone else’s profit.

I imagine it’s worse when you find out because an angry customer gives you a call and dresses you down while you unravel all of the strings.

OP worked for an IT company with a specific scope of work.

I owned an IT company, we’ll call it: UberTech, that strictly manages business networks; no website development, graphics, etc.

When an irate customer called, talking about something they didn’t handle, he got to the bottom of it.

One of my employees was tackling an interesting support request with instructions for making changes to a company’s website. This happens from time to time where a customer gets confused with their various tech vendors (or assumes that we provide all tech related services).

He called the person to get more context and being in earshot, I could tell that my employee’s call was quickly escalating with a frustrated person on the other end – and he has already offered to pass the call of to his manager, me.

ME: UberTech, How can I help you?

Angry Website Owner (WebOwner): I want to know what is going on here! I don’t know who you are, I don’t know why you’re calling me, and I don’t know why you have my support information.

ME: Sir, to be honest, I don’t know who you are, why we are calling you, and why we have your support information either; but together I think we can figure this out. I understand that you have a website and made a request for some changes. Who hosts your website?

WebOwner: Derp Company. On their support website there are instructions to send support requests, I followed them and now I have YOU calling me with MY support information.

ME: Sir, I definitely want to get down to the bottom of this. We do not even offer website services. If you would please work with me, I am sure we can get an answer. What I want to do is have you share your screen with me and then show me what you did to request support.

I had him run our remote control software. He then proceeded to navigate to Derp Co’s support website: support.derpco.com, navigated through the customer self service pages to a KnowledgeBase article (KB) on how to submit a support.

And that’s when he learned one of their competitors had stolen published articles from them and not bothered to change a single word.

He pulled up this specific KB article and I was staring at a VERBATIM copy of an article that I had written on our own support site!

There were NO changes to the article including the step to: “Email your support request to:” and it was my company’s email address right there!

ME: Thank you for taking the time to show me this, I think I found the problem. Notice the email address in the instructions – it is telling you to email UberTech dot com – that is us. Now, please allow me to show you something.

I then scrolled down to the bottom of Derp Co’s plagiarized support article and noted the creation date: 2007 I then navigated to our company support website: support.ubertech.com and navigated to our own matching article, we both confirmed that it was the same article and I showed him the creation date of our article: 2005

WebOwner: Oh, look at that.

ME: I think it is safe to say that Derp Co has stolen our content, did not even update the instructions, misleading you to send a support request to us.

WebOwner: I am sure you have a few things to take care of with Derp Co. I would appreciate it if you do not mention us when you call them.

ME: Of course sir. Thank you for your time with this.

I immediately searched Derp Co’s support website looking for more of our stolen content, found a total of 5 articles, and promptly printed them out and saved copies as PDF.

He thought about what to do, and came up with public shaming.

So what to do in this situation? Do I call the owner of Derp Co?

This is a small town so I needed to be clever and not taint my own image.

How do I get revenge? Hire a lawyer? Leave the articles as is and hope more support requests come to us that can bring us business?

Revenge Unleashed

NO, I wrote a PRESS RELEASE!

NEWS RELEASE RELEASE DATE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Title: UberTech Endorsed by local competitor

I got some great kudos from local businesses. One client in particular was rolling!

Of course it worked.

Two days later I get an email form the owner of Derp Co

I would appreciate it if you were to remove the Press Release from your website. This is a small town and it is just not good business.

I went to their support site and still found 3 articles, from our company!

I wrote back and told him that I would be happy to do so, but there are at least still 3 articles on their support site that need to be removed.

Two days later I got another email confirming that the articles were removed.

EPILOGUE

In the end I took down our Press Release but still have a copy kept in our office and would tell this story our new employees.

OP sounds pretty proud of himself, but does Reddit love it? Let’s find out!

The top comment says they would have played it another way.

This guy used yet a different tactic, with great success.

They think this is quite the wild story.

No shortage of folks being shady.

Some people just aren’t smart enough to cover their tracks.

I really enjoyed this retelling.

Sometimes you forget how ballsy some folks can be.