The 'Legalized Meaning of Words' According to Wordpress.com

I got an e-mail from an 'old' friend Hunter (probably not his real name) today. He helped me out regarding the exposure of online scammers last year. He (and his 'team') offered to continue my work in regards to exposing online retailers that 'forgot' to send the goods, after you payed..... I couldn't go on with this (important) work for several reasons. Reasons I won't go into at this time.
Anyway, he moved the available content to the public (and free) Wordpress platform and continued what I had left behind.

Earlier this week, Wordpress disabled the blog since it was in violation of their Terms of Service (ToS). And this is what they communicated according to Hunter;

This blog has been deactivated because we believe it does not comply with the WordPress.com Terms of Service or advertising policy.

If your blog is designed to promote affiliate links, get rich quick programs, banner ads, consists solely or mostly of duplicate or automatically generated material, or is part of a search engine marketing campaign, WordPress.com is not the place for you. Please use the Export feature to move your content to a more appropriate hosting service.

Occasionally we make mistakes. If you believe we have misclassified your blog, please click here to contact us as soon as possible so we can fix the problem.

He did review the ToS and the advertising policy, and didn't find anything that might cause this take-down. Questioning the Wordpress team about this gave him a weird answer. It seems that scam, scams, fraud etc. are 'words with a legalized meaning' (????), and cannot be used in the blogs name and/or URL........

So I guess that the following (Wordpress) blog are gonna be gone soon;

• http://camerafraud.wordpress.com/
• http://scams.wordpress.com/
• http://fraud.wordpress.com/
• http://onlinefraud.wordpress.com/
• etc.

In his e-mail regarding the take-down he also mentioned several other reasons that might have something to do with it;

the criminals, e.g. threatening with a DDoS on the Wordpress platform. This is what happened to the previous 'owner' of the blog, and his reason to give it up.

Google (Ads) for exposing them a facilitating ads platform for criminals.

GoDaddy for mentioning them in relation to SSL certificates which these criminals use in establishing some sort of trust for their victims.

For some reason, they all seem 'valid' reasons for the take-down, although I doubt that Wordpress will ever confirm this. At least the previous hoster (Dreamhost.com) did admit this when they 'booted' the blog from their platform last year. I didn't like that back then, but they were honest.... (and I am still a Dreamhost customer).

He did promise that they will return with a blog exposing the online scams, but under another name / URL etc.

Update on Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 19:23 by Willem

I heard today that Wordpress isn't responding to any inquiry regarding the blog's suspension/termination. It's like it never existed. So a #massive #FAIL (twitter-style) on Wordpress, their policies, and communication skills.

My advice, and of those who ran the actual terminated blog; Don't get a Wordpress blog. Blog elsewhere (anywhere).