It all started with Hrvoje K. looking for our company profile on GitHub. Searching for "netgen", the second result he got was Netgen Infotech, a company based in New Delhi, India. The name is not something that’s bothering us. After all, there are other companies out there called Netgen that we have been aware of for years. What was disconcerting was the fact that they used our logo. An exact copy of it.
We started looking into it and discovered that since November 2015, apart from their homepage, http://www.netgeninfotech.com, they’ve had at least 10 social accounts with our logo displayed in one form or another: GitHub (obviously), Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SlideShare, Issuu, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, Blogspot, Wordpress, Gravatar. And there are probably more out there.
Our first reaction was one of shock and disbelief! How could this happen? They’ve had it for almost a year? And we didn't know? What now? After some internal discussions, Ivo sent them an email asking for the logo to be taken down. No response. Then it hit us - there's a wonderful tool called DMCA! So we started sending out notices. One by one we took their social profiles down! Most of their accounts were suspended (Twitter, SlideShare, LinkedIn, DailyMotion) or the offending material had been removed from the account (Facebook images, Issuu publication, Vimeo video, Pinterest pins, Wordpress blog images). We even got GoDaddy to kill their website for a day or so. The only one giving us headache was GitHub not wanting to take action immediately, when it was obvious that the logo was stolen (they only recently took down their profile).
By this time, Ivo sent them another email, giving them an ultimatum: take down the logo or we’re going to write a blog post and expose you as frauds. Guess they didn't listen.
Unfortunately, not everything is nice and dandy. Soon they caught up on what we did. Shutting down their website was probably a trigger and they started changing the logo. And, guess what, they changed it to our logo again, but this time with a twist!
This is how their Issuu profile, and every other social media account, looked with our logo, before we found them.
And this is how their GitHub account looked after "changing" the logo:
And Facebook:
See what they did there? They took our logo, again, tuned the colors a bit, removed the dots, and added horizontal lines.
Well, dear Netgen Infotech, we will not steal anything from you and we will not sue you. It would be a waste of money and resources which could go into something more productive, like, you know, creating something original. We will, however, expose you and your owner as frauds hoping that someone somewhere will read this and choose not to do any kind of business with you and see you as common criminals and petty thieves, which you are!
To wrap it up, the company in question is called Netgen Infotech and is located in New Delhi, India, at two locations:
- Corporate Office : B-43, Budh Vihar, Badarpur, New Delhi - 110 044
- Branch Office: C - 3551, Green Fields, Faridabad, Haryana, India - 121 003
The owner is one Sarvesh Bhardwaj, judging by the WHOIS lookup.
He's also related to something called Techy Geek Hub, judging by the e-mail address in the WHOIS record.
In the end, we're pleased with the response we got from various social networks (apart from GitHub). We will keep on sending these pesky notices as soon as we discover other sites with our logo displayed until we remove them completely.