SEO assholes taking advantage of non-profits
Quick OSINT investigation on a website which tries to divert popular education for SEO purposes
"SEO assholes taking advantage of non-profits" on https://aligot-death.space, available at https://aligot-death.space/txt/seo-noise-en
It all started when a strange twitter account named FrPlateforme (archive) followed an association I'm in (it since went private). It had a certain je-ne-sais-quoi, such as generated tweets which kind of made sense but not really. The associated website https://plateforme-associations-formation.fr/ was cut from the same cloth, albeit on multiple pages. The website was a weird mix of computer security training and ocean cleaning campaigns. The structure of the website itself made no sense and the content was either clearly "stolen" or non-sensical... Long story short, trying to understand it felt like a psychadelic experience.
First steps#
Once I made peace with my perception of reality, I started digging. Turns out, it's exactly what it seems: a weird patchwork of copy-pasted content. For instance, The page "Définition > DNS":
Is a copy-pasta from the DNS Wikipedia page.
It became increasingly clear that someone was trying to capitalize on specific terms to generate traffic and exploit it. Nothing new under the sun. However, the name of the website and the angle suggested that the target was non-profit organizations, specifically popular education fighting the digital divide. Knowing the effects of that divide amongst some populations, and the amount of work provided by volonteers and organizations around the world to reduce it, it raises eyebrows.
So, I had to dig further to find out who was behind this.
A first inquiry through WHOIS (domain name's registering infos) was unsuccessful, as it often happens these days. The provided e-mail seems however very basic, association1901@protonmail.ch [1].
| [1] | "1901's Associations" (Associations Loi 1901) are your run of the mill form of association in france. |
Given that it's a wordpress website, I try to go to https://plateforme-associations-formation.fr/?author=1, (Then 2, 3,...) to have more infos on the authors; two usernames stand out, as cryptic as the e-mail: "spectre1901" and "cyber1901". When I try to search these on the web, I find another website, 1901.eu (since deleted). Same MO, some copy-pasted content, non-profit lingo, computerz and save-the-ocean. Some notable differences however: they deactivated the right-click on text (ironic, and also probably to prevent investigations into plagiarism), several links to various political content (thinkerview, ATTAC, Datagueule, all fairly large french political initiatives) through various formats (webpage, videos, and even a web-archive link to a video?). The footer 'Plateforme-Associations-Formations 2021' and the WHOIS (association1901_2021@protonmail.ch) confirms that it's linked to the first website: basically a newer copy. A small quirk however: the main menu has a button "Contact Paris", which links to a page named "contact-geneve".
Something starts to appear: "cityweb.fr", for instance on the "Contact Paris" page (which has "Contact Lyon" as a subpage). Amongst various infos, we got:
- "Edouard : Président" ;
- "Nicolas : Immobilier & Crypto" ;
- "Contact : plateforme-associations-formation.fr@protonmail.ch" ;
There's text here. I promise. Make sure to contact them if you want a website.
A less subtle reference to CityWeb is a huge banner under the page "Formation > ChatBot"
So, I went to their website. This company specializes in bullshit, such as SEO, chatbots, webmarketing and "digital transformation". Mind, you, "digital" doesn't mean jack shit in french aside from "finger-related" except for con artists in the marketing industry, so "transformation digitale" basically means "fingery transformation". That "new" bullshitty supposedly modernity-inspiring meaning of the word is unfortunately gaining traction in mainstream medias.
Not so long ago,, the "they trust us" category only had the default companies ("armond", "darkside", "bastil", "bolier", etc) from default templates from the (wordpress) plugin Elementor. It's now listing various websites, which, even though they look sliiightly more plausible, have the same structure and content.
Their twitter (archive) is extremely recent, and doesn't even have a link to the website and no tweet so far. In the mean time, the even newer twitter account "plateforme-association-formation.fr" started retweeting a weird mix of content, ranging from Thinkerview to the Chinese Ambassy, as well as cryptocoins, the controversial Idriss Aberkane on the verge of COVID denialism, and some random IT news. Recently (May 2021), a mention to the Generation Écologie political party appeared, infering some link to their initiative, while keeping plausible deniability.
Finally, their instagram account has 10 followers, 8 of which are very similar "etoile" ("star" in french) accounts, all pointing to the website etoile.app, and all posting some random crap. Honorable mention to "exultationetoile":
Conclusion#
It seems that the "plateforme-association-formation.fr" website is an attempt to abuse keywords from the association and popular education world. The goal is to boost a fairly new webmarketing agency, meant for small companies trying to jump on the "digital" (remember, fingers) train, following the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the amount of work provided by volonteers and hundreds of organizations to fight against the digital divide, and given how some populations are hit even harder by it, it's a very cynical entreprise.