Another Yahoo Groups Thief
Another Yahoo Group owner discovered a blog thief with all of the Group's posts being added to the blog.
A search of the Groups membership found no member using a blogger.com email address. This meant the culprit was using an email forwarding which sent all of the emails to the blogger.com email address. With over 3000 members, finding the thief seemed to be a daunting task.
The detective work began with the Group's owner importing the Group membership into an Excel file and sorting by whether or not the member received all of the email individually. (This has to be the option or the posts would not go to the blog immediately.)
Since the blog showed the Fully Featured emails, the owner then searched those members who received their emails in that format.
A search of the blog's HTML revealed the blog owner's BlogSpot profile and the profile showed the country of origin. This was a fortunate find as now the Group owner identified the thief's email rather easily. The owner set this member to No Mail and waited. When the Group messages no longer appeared on the blog, it became obvious the guilty member had been discovered.
So as we discover how the thievery is done, the thieves try other ways to do their evil deeds.
The practice of stealing content for blogs is not new and is apparently a method many unscrupulous folks use. The reason is purely mercenary, as once the blog is setup, the thieves subscribe to Google AdSense. Every time someone clicks a Google ad, the crook gets paid.
This particular thief has a great many blogs. Not all of them are stealing content from Yahoo Groups, but most if not all of those blogs are stealing content from somewhere. Since this thief has so many blogs, he is now hiding his profile on some of them to make it harder to find him.