Yes, you read that correctly. There’s fraud happening all over the internet, and blogs are no different. Recently I became aware of the fact that a blog post was published entitled “Great Mortgage Fraud Info THANK YOU Tracy Coenen.” I thought that was odd, as I don’t write about mortgage fraud.

I went and took a peek and verified that I’ve never seen this information before, much less written about it. I assumed that the blog was one of those slimy little types that plagiarizes posts from other blogs. Usually the motive is Google ad revenue (the blogs are geared specifically toward getting search engine traffic there and hoping people will click on your ads).

Then the article started popping up on other blogs with the same title, and I just knew that it was the work of more slimy blog stealer types. But what could I do? They didn’t steal my words, just my name. I assumed they were trying to get some of the “fraud” Google mojo associated with my name.

And then this blog post showed up…. “They say that the best form of flattery is being copied. However, I wonder if you might call it flattery or Plagiarism?”

Gena Riede is the real author of the mortgage fraud article. She exchanged several emails with the owner of the original blog (Mortgage Fraud Blog) who posted Gena’s article (word for word, in its entirety) with my name. Their response was priceless: “Thank you very much for contacting us regarding your article. My sincerest apologies as we obtain information from countless sources and are unable to verify the origins of them all. Please refer to our blog for our corrections.”

So the Mortgage Fraud Blog is apparently copying lots of articles from lots of different sources, without any permission, and without taking care to make sure that they’re actually citing the right sources. How low can you go?