– I am shocked and angry. It is sickening that someone should profit from this, says Bente Kristine Bakkemo. She is looking for a new home for the dog Atlas, who she believes deserves more time than she is able to give him. In September, she published an advertisement on Finn with pictures and a description of Atlas. Shortly afterwards, the content appeared in completely different places, without her being aware of it. – I have no words, it’s so rotten. Bente Kristine Bakkemo together with the dog Atlas. Photo: Daniel Harvey / Privat Bakkemo is not alone. news has spoken to three other dog owners who say that their Finn ads have been copied by the website Nytt-dyr.com. Bakkemo hopes someone can give Atlas a happy everyday life with lots of play, cuddles and trips. Photo: Bente Kristine Bakkemo news’s survey shows that Nytt-dyr.com is only a small part of an international network for buying and selling animals. Feel cheated Nytt-dyr says they collect all animal ads in one place. But it says nothing that many of the ads have been stolen from Finn.no. news has bought a subscription from Nytt-dyr and carried out random tests. Several of the advertisements take us on to Finn. Other ads only show a phone number. Jane Aronsen Ozani says she neither received a phone number nor was put in contact with an owner when she subscribed. She feels cheated by Nytt-dyr. Ozani bought a subscription to be put in touch with the owner of a few-week-old puppy. The website states that this costs NOK 9 for three days. She thought it wasn’t that much to pay to get in touch with the owner. But when she logged in, there was no contact information available. Roger Larsen’s advertisement for the relocation of Balder has also been copied by Nytt-dyr. Photo: Roger Larsen A few days later, Ozani discovered that she had withdrawn NOK 399 from Nytt-dyr. – I thought, what in heaven’s name has happened. I was furious and pissed off, says Ozani. In small print, at the very bottom, on the website it says: “If the membership is not canceled within 3 days, it will cost NOK 399 per four weeks and will be renewed until you cancel the membership.” Ozani believes it was not made clear enough. She contacted customer service and asked for a refund. She didn’t get that. news has seen the dialogue. There was no new puppy either. – I want to warn all of Norway if I can. Every time something from Nytt-dyr comes up, I post a comment and say that people must stay away. After consulting with the bank, she blocked her card. Has your ad been stolen? If you discover that images or text that you have created yourself are being used without your consent, you have rights. Commercial enterprises are not allowed to do this. You can request that the images and advertisement be removed. In the law known as the Intellectual Property Act, you have the right to something called a reasonable remuneration for use, meaning that you have the right to payment for someone having illegally used the content for which you have copyright. You can contact the company directly. If you do not receive an answer, or lack contact information, you can report the matter to the conciliation council. It is the first instance in the “court hierarchy”. You can also send a complaint to the Norwegian Consumer Protection Authority, they oversee the Marketing Act, among other things. Source: Thomas Iversen, senior legal adviser at the Consumer Council. Nytt-dyr does not disclose either the organization number or contact information on the website. Breaking the law, the Consumer Council believes news took the documentation to the Consumer Council. The way the network works is unusual, explains senior legal adviser Thomas Iversen. – If there is a significant number of ads that have been stolen from Finn, then it is quite unique. Photo: Julie Helene Günther / news They also break the law, claims the Consumer Council. – It is illegal to copy content from other websites without permission. Copyright, which is about what you produce yourself, places restrictions on text and images. Legal adviser at the Norwegian Consumer Council, Thomas Iversen, says the website engages in misleading marketing. Photo: Julie Helene Günther / news According to Iversen, there is also no doubt that Nytt-dyr engages in misleading marketing. – They give the impression that you have to pay to be able to send a message to the seller, while in reality it is free to do via finn.no. International network Facebook is an important traffic driver for the network. They use the platform to publish excerpts of the copied ads. news has identified 14 Facebook groups that promote ads for Nytt-dyr. These groups together have over 190,000 members. Pictures of dogs are regularly posted there, which lead to the Nytt-dyr website. It is not only Norwegians that the network lures with cute dogs. news has found eight active websites associated with the network of animal advertisements. The websites are aimed at Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and England. The animal portal operates in many different languages and tries to reach people in different countries. Graphics: Collage/Martin Gundersen / Screenshots One of the websites in this network, dyreportal.dk, was created by the company Online Comet Aps. The company has three Danish directors – Philip Høygård Ørbæk, Kevin Bach Reese and Christian Kjær Mathisen. In 2021, Ekstra Bladet revealed that these three were behind similar copy pages in Denmark and Sweden. Through various channels, news has made repeated attempts to get a comment from the Danes, without success. Philip Høygård Ørbæk defended their method of copying advertisements to Ekstra Bladet. He believed that the owners of the personal ads should not mind more visibility. This is how news mapped the network: news first started by investigating where the personal ads came from. By using the search function reverse image search, we could see that many of the same images had been published on the marketplace Finn. There we also saw that “New animals” had identical ad texts that already published Finn ads. The animal portal linked at the bottom of its website to a Facebook page. Under “Openness about pages” it was stated that the administrators were based in Denmark, Bangladesh and Spain. It indicated that those who ran the animal portal did not stay in Norway. A Google search on the website showed that they paid for ads with the search engine. Google makes it possible to obtain more information about the advertisers, which revealed the company name “Datatech Fz-LLC” and that it is registered in the United Arab Emirates. news could also see that Datatech announced three other animal portals in addition to “Nytt-dyr”. This is how we found some of the websites in the network, but not all. Searches on BuiltWith, an analysis service aimed at websites, showed which technologies these four websites used. There we also received an indication that “New animal” used the same identity code in Google Tag Manager as a visually different animal portal called “poteportal.dk”. Searches for such identity codes indicated that “djurportal.se”, “dyreportal.dk” and “tiere-finden.com” were also part of the network. Several of the Facebook groups news could link to “New animals” stated that they had many administrators in Denmark. It indicated that the network was controlled or at one time started there. All websites must register information about who created the website, so-called whois data. In recent years, more of this information has been leaked, but it can still yield interesting hits. Among other things, it showed that Nytt-dyr was registered by someone with a contact address in the United Arab Emirates. A lookup of whois data showed that “dyreportal.dk” was created the earliest of all the websites. It was from 2019. This posting also showed that the website was created by the company of the Danish company “Online Comet ApS”. Further searches for the people behind led to Ekstra Bladet’s revelations from 2021 about Danes who copy personal ads from other marketplaces. news’s mapping shows that eight active animal portals (as of 25 October) aimed at six countries can be linked to each other: djurportal.se dyreportal.dk kekets.co.uk tiere-finden.com nytt-dyr.com newpetz.com vindhuisdieren.com uusilemmikki .com We can determine this based on technical, textual and visual similarities in the websites. Finn.no will take action – This website previously operated under the names finndyr.com and nytdyr.com. We have taken action against these sites, and we were upheld in our complaint to WIPO that they could not continue their practice. That’s what Geir Pettersen Gjefsen in Finn writes in an e-mail to news. After the complaint, the site was moved to Nytt-dyr.com, he explains. – Finn will also pursue this side. The dog Lykke is almost 3 years old. Christina Ellertsen Løyning has published an advertisement with her for relocation at Finn. Photo: Christina Ellertsen Løyning They do not allow the practice, but say it is difficult to stop. – Anyone who uses Finn can see the ads and then create their own ads based on them. – To advertisers on Finn who are exposed to this, we want to say that we are sorry that they are exposed to this, and that it is not something we agree to happen, writes Pettersen Gjefsen. Didn’t know the pictures were taken Dog owner Christina Ellertsen Løyning didn’t know that pictures of her dog Lykke were being used by the network before news called. – It’s absolutely insane. I don’t quite know what to say about it once. I don’t want anything to do with it, she says. Christina Ellertsen Løyning does not like that her advertisement has been copied by the website. Photo: Private The 27-year-old finds it unpleasant to think that the pictures have gone astray. She is happy that there was no one else in the pictures she uploaded on Finn. – I became very anxious and afraid. Published 21.11.2024, at 11.20
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“Nytt-dyr.com” steals dog pictures to sell subscriptions – news Norway – Overview of news from different parts of the country
