Ethical players, steer clear of Wix. Unlike most hosts, their terms and conditions are just for show, and are unenforced. In other words, I can report fraud, but they won’t lift a finger.
From me to Wix, December 10:
Dear Wix Abuse Team:
A customer of yours has posted false content, misrepresenting me and infringing on my name rights. Before you say you require a court order, I believe I can demonstrate to your satisfaction that the content should be removed by Wix.The page in question is:
[redacted]
This is in violation of your terms of use, at section 2.1, paragraph 7.
There is no such thing as a Google SEO company bearing my name. There is no one with my name working in SEO. I have no connection to your customer in any way. I have never partnered with them, and I do not endorse them in any way.
The following statements on the page above are blatant lies or misuse my name:
[redacted]
I approached your customer directly on November 7 about their misrepresentations, and nothing was done.
The origins of such posts are possibly with Semrush, with buggy reports about trending keywords. Your customer has chosen to believe the program and keyword-stuff the search engines. Sadly the result of some of this disinformation is that I have received abuse, because people think I am behind this spam. If this is the case, then they additionally violate s. 2.3 (11) of your terms of use as a form of fraud and unethical marketing. They also violate s. 3 of your content guidelines.
Regardless of the origin, your customer has no right to trade off my name, and I hope Wix can enforce its terms of use accordingly.
Thay from Wix responds on December 12:
Hi,
Thank you for contacting us.I have checked the site which you reported and was not able to determine it is in violation of Wix Terms of Use.
As a website building platform, we are not responsible for our users’ activities or for any content they publish, nor do we provide any law enforcement or legal services, or take any other part in any disputes involving our users and any of their visitors.
You are of course free to take legal action against any of our users as you deem necessary, but please keep in mind that we will not and cannot take any part in such action.
We would like to suggest you contact the site owner directly with your concerns, or proceed to seek other legal actions for the removal of the content you believe to abuse your rights, or it’s against the law. If you have obtained a valid official document instructing us to remove the website, please send it, and we will be more than happy to remove it from our platform.
In other words, they probably didn’t read anything I wrote. So, to reiterate:
Hi Thay:
As I have already said, I contacted your customer, to no avail. They have ignored my request.Only then do I contact hosts.
Are you saying that your terms of service are for show, and they are unenforced by you?
There are a number of clauses in there that this content violates. Most other hosts have no issue in removing fraudulent activity from their platforms.
And if you require official documents, from which jurisdictions do you accept?
The following day, Keith from Wix replies:
Hi,
Thank you for contacting us back.As mentioned previously, we reviewed the site carefully and were not able to determine it is in violation of Wix Terms of Use.
You are of course free to take legal action against any of our users as you deem necessary, but please keep in mind that we will not and cannot take any part in such action.
We would like to suggest you contact the site owner directly with your concerns, or proceed to seek other legal actions for the removal of the content you believe to abuse your rights, or it’s against the law. If you have obtained a valid official document instructing us to remove the website, please send it, and we will be more than happy to remove it from our platform.
On the 14th, I responded:
Dear Keith:
I’ll be sure to note publicly Wix’s complicity in online fraud and to quote your and Thay’s responses.As already noted twice, I have approached your customer, to no avail.
For the second time, I ask: of which jurisdictions will you accept those ‘official documents’ you and Thay both refer to, or are these empty words like the contents of your terms of use?
And nothing, as expected from cowards. They always seem to go quiet when you ask them about legal jurisdictions.
It’s hard to believe that Wix is actually asking you to include them in a court order, which, of course, means being named as a co-defendant in a fraud case. That’s terrible customer service training, to put the firm into the crosshairs of a lawsuit.
They keep saying that they won’t be part of any legal action, but then they are basically asking to be part of legal action by insisting on a court order—I guess they’re not smart enough to know how these things work, even in a litigious country as theirs. Sadly, they also don’t seem smart enough to know how hosting terms of service work.
US firms have tended to be very good at dealing with these issues, but lately the experience has been quite poor. Some have allowed fraud to propagate. Some firms there commit fraud. Most other hosts, American, Asian and European, have taken their terms of service seriously. Wix doesn’t.
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