Uncovering the Theft of My Auto-Swiper Extension

On a nice Monday morning, I was making my routine checks of my Auto Swiper Extension for Dating Sites. Do all systems work? Are they still swiping on the major dating sites like Tinder, Bumble, and Badoo? Then, I looked in the Chrome Web Store for my search ranking and to see if there were any other new auto-swipers I needed to watch out for ;)

And there it was, a new auto-swiper extension released on the first of April. So, I opened the detail view and couldn't believe my eyes as I saw a familiar look of the UI with some slight changes. So, I dug deeper and checked out the description... Hmm... that sounds familiar, and it is... since I had written this description for the web store myself. So, he even copy-pasted my description with just one sentence more, and instead of "Auto Swiper," he writes "AutoSwiper."

So, I downloaded the extension files to check if I could find any code references to me. Most of the time, this is a bit harder since my extension was built and minified. Sure, he would do the same and, in addition, he also obfuscated the code (the naming of methods and functions were not recognizable, which is not allowed by Google), and still, he was able to publish it. "WTF, Google?"

So, after downloading, the first thing I checked was the manifest.json, and I couldn't believe what I saw there. He was even too lazy to remove my website's URL from the host permissions. Even the order of the "content_scripts->matches" was the same. That's quite unique, I would guess. So, this was another clear sign that he had stolen some code from my extension!

Well, what to do now?

• I have contacted this person by mail about my concerns and requested him to take down the extension, else he will hear from my lawyer (need to find one who is used to such matters).
• I have reported copyright issues with this extension to Google.
• I have additionally mailed Google about the removal of this extension, which is clearly violating my copyright.
• I have made a review on his extension about this issue and linked my extension (most likely will get removed for spam, XD).
• I have made plenty of screenshots and copied the code from the extension so I have it as a backup for any further steps.

So, now I'm waiting for 1-2 weeks to get some response from Google. If not, I will need to contact a lawyer in this matter.

I have no problem when users take inspiration from my work, but this is clearly too much for me and makes me mad that some people think they can just do what they want!

What do you guys think? Have you also had such problems? Do you maybe know a good, affordable ;) lawyer for this matter?