How To Steal an Online Recruiting Site

See the two logos above. Pretty similar aren't they. One is for eFinancialCareers.com, a Dice Holdings company, and the other is for eFinancialCareers.cn. If you go to the web pages you'll see they are almost identical in visual branding (although the .cn version is in Chinese) including the .cn version linking to other international eFinancialCareers sister sites around the world. However, as you've probably guessed. eFinancialCareers.cn is in no way connected with eFinancialCareers.com. It's a site created by a company in China who have been slick enough to buy the domain name and copy the branding of the original site.

I don't yet have any concrete information on whether this is a scam to collect credit card details or whether it's a legitimate online job site, but either way the executives at eFinancialCareers.com must be choking on their Dom Perignon. China is heating up as a financial careers markets with all of the global banks and investment institutions increasing operations and hiring activities throughout the entire Asia region and China in particular. For them to lose their name in China like this would be annoying in the least and possibly disastrous.

Funnily enough there is a huge drive on in China at the moment with a 100 day crackdown on protecting Intellectual Property Rights. From the People's Daily (english):

From July 15 to October 25, China will wage a 100-day Campaign with intense efforts to investigate and shut down institutions engaged in producing, renting and selling pirated audio-video products and computer software and severely punish those involved in these activities. The campaign also aims to raise the awareness of both businesses and the public of fighting piracy.

It will be interesting to see if anything can really be done about this case which isn't piracy of the audio-video or software sort. I'd also be very interested to hear opinion from people in the online recruiting business on how they feel about it. And by the way, have you bought your corporate domain for China?

Hat tip to Doron Vermaat at NewChinaCareers for bring this to my attention.