22 July 2024
Our investigation started in early April 2024, when we received a mail from “Alissa Muncy” claiming that an article from the Peruvian investigatory newspaper Ojo Publico – about the money laundry of Joaquín Ramírez – was an infringement of copyright. Mrs. Muncy pointed us to the website infouse.exposure[.]co as the original source of the investigation.
Just like many other cases that Qurium has investigated, the original investigation was a back-dated clone hosted in a low cost publishing platform to claim DMCA copyright violation.
Who is Alissa Muncy?
The mails from Mrs. Muncy representing “Judith Warner”, that happened to be a former special correspondent for Newsweek in Paris, provided us a first hint. The emails contained the timezone of the sender, which gave us a first hint of her location as they were sent from timezone GMT +05:30.
We also recorded that the very same day that we received the notification, someone used the service “hosting-checker.net” to find out where Ojo Publico was hosted.
When asking “Alissa” about what specific parts of the article were copyrighted we received this response:
The response from “Alissa” also included some additional hidden information. The document contained meta data which revealed that it was created by “Ashi Aggarwal”. No signs of Alissa Muncy or Judith Warner.
A social media profile of Ashi Aggarwal (Bisht) revealed that she was working for Initiatrix Technologies in Noida (India).
Alissa Muncy also seems to run a blog that has been used to run several DMCA take down requests with Google, which can be found in the Lumen Database here.
Initiatrix
Behind the company Initiatrix we found two Indian business men and several entrepreneurs: Jha Piyush and Vipin Kumar with a track record in online reputation management and digital marketing services.
In India the Initiatrix Technologies Private Limited is registered in Noida in the name of Amit Vatsya with the address:
Unit/Office No.311, Tower-A, A-40, 3rd Floor
Ithum It Park, Sector-62
Gautam Buddha Nagar
Noida-201301
Uttar Pradesh
India
Reputation Protection Online
The following websites are associated with Piyush Jha and associates. The website reputationprotectiononline[.]com offers a large catalog of products to remove online content and improve reputation online.
digitviral[.]com
initiatrix[.]com
modrika[.]com
reputationprotectiononline[.]com
secureonlinereputation[.]com
voceduonline[.]com
deletenegativelinks[.]com
On 23 June 2024, Qurium reached out to Piyush Jha at Initiatrix asking for an explanation. Four weeks later (22 July) we have still not received any response.
Soon after our mails were sent to Initiatrix Ashi Aggarwal (aka “Alissa Muncy”) closed her social media profile.
Ojo Publico report: India detres del negocio global por borrar reportaje de Ojo Publico