Entire Shopify Store Stolen and Duplicated - Please Help!

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

A Shopify store owner discovered their entire product catalog (6000+ products, images, descriptions) was scraped and duplicated on a fraudulent domain they don’t control. The scam site appears designed to harvest customer credit card data by offering deep discounts and requesting payment authorization.

Resolution Process:

  • Running a WHOIS lookup to identify the domain registrar
  • Contacting the registrar’s abuse email (PublicDomainRegistry.com or Web Commerce Communication Ltd. were common)
  • Filing reports with Cloudflare, ICANN, and Google
  • Most successful approach: emailing the registrar’s abuse contact resulted in takedown within 24-48 hours

Key Findings:

  • This is a widespread, recurring problem affecting multiple merchants
  • The same scammers (often registered in Malaysia/Wilayah Persekutuan) repeatedly create new domains
  • Shopify cannot help if the fraudulent site isn’t hosted on their platform
  • Right-click prevention code offers minimal protection as scraping tools bypass it easily
  • Legal action is typically impractical due to international jurisdictions

Ongoing Challenges:

  • Sites reappear under different domains after takedown
  • Merchants express frustration that Shopify doesn’t implement stronger native protections
  • Buying up similar domains is expensive and ultimately futile
  • The .shop domain registry shows limited responsiveness to abuse reports

Participants recommend monitoring Google searches for duplicate sites and immediately reporting new instances to registrars.

Summarized with AI on November 4. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
17

Shopify is very much aware of the problem. They do not do anything about it. They can simply create the code so people can not replicate our sites. They merely dont do it, because all they care is about their pockets and how they can get you signed up for shopify plus.

Shopify in the last 2 years, has taken away my shopify payments and forced me to go to paypal because they said i had many fradulent transactions ( I had 13 disputes since i opened my store in 2014 .

I had my site replicated over 55 times, as I have fought these scammers tooth to nail. What shopify did about it? NOTHING!