One of Toronto’s best-known winter traditions looks to have won its fight to have a fake website, apparently riding on the coattails of its popularity, pulled offline.
The Distillery District Winter Village, which transforms the historic area into a Christmas paradise until early January, is a spot where many visitors to the city and locals flock.
It has, however, been struggling to differentiate itself from a knock-off website, which has been climbing search engine rankings recently.
“I think it’s taking advantage of the popularity of this amazing festival and, unfortunately, taking advantage of people — or at least trying to by just sending to another website,” Rik Ocvirk, the director of experiences at the Distillery Historic District, told Global News.
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He said the winter village drew roughly one million visitors last year, and was expecting to draw similar crowds this holiday season.
The fake website, which titles itself “The Toronto Christmas Market | Official Website,” references events in the Distillery District and even claims to sell tickets.
You couldn’t actually buy tickets on the site, which was populated with links for online gambling and other commercials.
“There’s a fraudulent website that’s been around for at least a year that I know of,” Ocvrik said. “It’s not ours, ours is thedistillerywintervillage.com, this other website is just promoting it looks like gambling links to it.”
After a flurry of press about the issue on Thursday, the site appears to have been pulled down.
The Distillery District told Global News a team had been working overtime to try and get the site removed, attempting to track who was hosting it and where. They said a complaint had been lodged with both the police and the domain host about the site.
Sometime on Friday morning, it appears to have been taken offline.
The web address assigned to the site times out, with an error message saying the IP address could not be found.
Still, the Toronto attraction is warning anyone attending and buying tickets to be vigilant.
— with files from Global News’ Sean O’Shea
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