As like every morning, I was skimming through my daily ShopTalk newsletter. One story caught my eye, "Fake Macon TV Station Runs A Scam". The story was a copy of the original story from WAGT in Augusta.

It's a scam involving a so-called television station in downtown Macon, Georgia. The Web site for "Action 25 News" is ripping consumers off across the state, and possibly the nation. It's a story the Better Business Bureau is now investigating.

After posting her resume to monster.com, she was directed to a fake TV news Web site, WACT, Action 25 News, a cable channel out of Macon. The site was complete with weather updates, an "award winning news team"

I was curious how professional their website looked if they were able to trick people into thinking it was a real television station. A quick google search revealed the fake station's website to be action25news.com. So I checked out the site and... WTF? That's my station's website! The website design was blatantly stolen directly from WAXN-TV.


I created those show graphics and I wrote those show descriptions. That Action News graphic is the logo I designed for our station's newscast. That Severe Weather Center logo was stolen from our sister station WSOC-TV - they just covered up the 9 logo with a 25. Even the scrolling program lineup is uniquely ours. It's all completely stolen.

It's bad enough to blatantly steal creative works but it's a whole 'nother ballgame when that stolen work is then used to steal money from innocent victims. All they did was replace our station name with the fake name. I can tell from the minor differences that they stole our website design and content last summer. First, our station used to brand itself as "Action 64", explaining why they have the same logo design but wrote Action25 instead of using call letters. Also, the order in which the shows appear on their fake website is the same order we had ours in before it was changed last fall.

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