Previously we have reviewed Carlauren Group’s care home investments offering 10% per year and Carlauren’s C-Coin cryptocurrency investment, which Carlauren claims will jump in value by 170% as soon as they have sold £35 million worth (current sales as at April 2019: £3,290).
Carlauren hasn’t been particularly happy with my coverage, previously sending its former Head of Marketing into the comments to make vague accusations about “significant inaccuracies” without actually pointing any out.
Their unhappiness has now escalated into perjury.
The United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows the owners of copyrighted material to file takedown notices, asking Google or other web providers to remove the copyrighted material.
There is a way to abuse this process to trick Google into removing content from its web searches that you don’t want to be seen. This involves stealing the content from the owner, uploading it elsewhere, changing the date so that your stolen content appears to have been uploaded first, and then filing a takedown notice to Google, claiming that your stolen content is the original, and the real content is the copy.
This is exactly what Carlauren Group has done.
A filing uploaded to the Lumen database indicates that an “Isabel De La Iglesia” claimed (in Spanish) that my first two Carlauren blogs were written by her on 16 and 17 August 2017 on jhonsonconsultores.wordpress.com, and then stolen by me.
Needless to say this is not true and it is very possible that Isabel Church does not exist. Also needless to say, no legal proceedings have been received by us from Carlauren or “Isabel De La Iglesia” directly.
It would have been physically impossible for either blog to have been written in August 2017. Carlauren’s C-Coin did not exist at the time, and my first blog was based on Carlauren investment literature dated Spring 2018.
The stolen articles have now been removed from jhonsonconsultores.wordpress.com, although a fragment remains in Google’s cache. The blog now shows a bunch of Spanish-language articles that have also been ineptly stolen from elsewhere. For example, this blog (stolen from tenemosnoticias.com) pretends it was published in 2016, despite the fact that it includes Twitter quotes from 2018.
Filing a DMCA takedown notice requires the filer to swear that the content is theirs under penalty of perjury.
While I could easily file a counter-notice, I think I’d rather let this sorry episode stand as a warning to potential Carlauren Group investors.
Investors in Carlauren Group, their Care Home Group suites or C-Coins should think very carefully before investing in an unregulated company whose representatives engage in this kind of blatant deception.