Ask HN: Help Me Understand This Website Scam (Friends Business Site Cloned)

Hoping the community can help analyze a suspicious site that clones my friend's legitimate business.

    Nutripea (https://nutripea.com/) → Real company, real physical location.
    Norleaf Food (https://norleaffood.com/) → Clone of Nutripea’s website, no physical location, questionable intent.

A few things stand out:

    -The source code of Norleaf Food is nearly identical to Nutripea’s, including Nutripea’s Google Analytics ID.
    -In some places, they forgot to change Nutripea’s physical address, suggesting a careless copy-paste job.
    -The Wayback Machine shows Norleaf Food first appeared a few years ago, then disappeared, and now it’s back.
    -The contact form on Norleaf Food is slightly modified and submits data to FormCarry (a form submission service).

I’ve tried emailing Norleaf, but no response. I’m wondering:

    What could be the purpose of cloning this site?
    Does anything in the source code hint at their intent?
    Has anyone seen similar scams before, and what’s the endgame?

2 comments

whatamidoingyoanno scorso

Someone did the exact same thing to JavaScript Today. Their domain was jstoday.cyou. It was an exact replica, but included a different analytics service, and the emails were changed to their domain. You can still see the results in Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ajstoday.cyou&oq=site%...

I reported the domain name to Namecheap, and in a few days, the site was down. Commenting because I'd like to know what this is about as well.

duxupanno scorso

Some sort of SEO domain boosting?