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Local bloggers - including Nathan T. Wright, Andy Brudtkuhl and Brett Trout - created posts and Twitter messages informing customers that TrustyPig was using the SmartyPig Web design features illegally.

Within a couple days, TrustyPig began replacing its Web designs, Gaskel said.

SmartyPig was launched early this year as the nation's first online savings account with social networking capacity, where friends and family can contribute to savers' accounts at West Bank to help meet specific savings goals.

TrustyPig's Web site says it is an online marketing company. It's not clear where the site operates from, but a post on it explains that the SmartyPig mistake occurred when "a programer from Romania and a designer from China" were hired to design Web pages.

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Mike Ferarri, one of SmartyPig’s founders, expressed to me that he didn’t think there was any possible legal recourse since TrustyPig is located in Romania. That’s when the Twitter community decided to take matters into their own hands. I called for the o

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Rather than post the response on their own blog (which any transparent company would do), TrustyPig opts instead to work through an affiliate at Money News Online. The response is actually two-fold: first coming from a poorly-constructed, grammatically-ch

trustypig brandhijack

One thing companies can do is to enlist others to reprint details of the webjacking, mentioning the webjacker in the title of the article, while taking great care not to link to the webjacker or the webjacked website. Such was the case recently in Des Moi

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Yesterday I posted about a Romanian company, TrustyPig, ripped off a local Des Moines web startup SmartyPig. After that, I made a call to action - for a Social Brand Hijack. It had ten steps - the first being to blog about it. In this post I’ll highlight

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In what can only be seen as a victory for everybody who has ever had their site design ripped off, the creators of TrustyPig have at least changed their sites colors and logo on their main blog to something other than the exceptional design by HappyCog th

trustypig brandhijack

But I’m not prepared to shut up about this just yet. Yes, they’ve finally decided to change their site, but what TrustyPig did was still utterly despicable. If they are willing to steal someone’s site design, then obviously they can’t be trusted as a comp

trustypig brandhijack

This is another classic instance of design knockoff. Chinese mp3 players knocked off the iPod. Apple knocked off Xerox. Microsoft knocked off Apple (I joke). For what reason, you ask? Because the other guy did it better and it’s easier to copy than to inn

trustypig smartypig brandhijack

We don’t have many web 2.0 products coming out of Des Moines these days (you can read my commentary about that here). So when something hideous and wrong happens to one of our few entrepreneurial successes, we take notice, and we do something about it.

trustypig smartypig brandhijack

I couldn't believe this when I saw it. This Romanian company, TrustyPig has COMPLETELY ROBBED its brand and Web design from a company that I hold dear to my heart - SmartyPig, How can TrustyPig be allowed to do this!? SOOOOOO shady!

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A brand hijack is in full swing. More brand hijack info here. Get involved and smash the TrustyPig brand!

trustypig brandhijack

trustypig branding brandhijack