TECNOCEN.COM, a company that provided technological services for the Visit México platform, filed a lawsuit against Miguel Torruco, Secretary of Tourism, before the Ministry of Public Function (SFP).
In accordance with the minutes of the lawsuit filed this Monday afternoon, the sole administrator of the company, Juan Sergio Loredo Foyo, pointed out that the head of the Sectur blamed him for ‘hacking’ the page that concentrates the country’s tourism offer.
According to the document, Loredo referred to an interview offered by Torruco to Joaquín López Dóriga, where the secretary points out that “some Braintivity providers began to have a series of decisions (…) and chose to hack the page, practically steal the domains “.
The Visit Mexico page has had a couple of problems in the last two weeks: first the page was blocked for ‘non-payment’ and just last Friday the English version of the site presented literal translations that affected the image of the country in the middle of the worst crisis in tourism.
Last Sunday, Torruco reported that Sectur filed a complaint with the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) against whoever is responsible for the damage to the image of the Mexico brand and the federal Secretariat itself.
After last Friday, the Visit México website showed translations of states and cities of the Mexican Republic. In the case of the state of Guerrero, the translation was ‘Warrior’; Torreón’s was ‘Turret’; Madero’s, ‘Log’; that of Hidalgo, ‘Noble’; and the one in Tulum, ‘Jumpsuit’.
The official also explained that day that the domain of the account linked to visitmexico.com is blocked by the company Tecnocen.com, which allegedly had a business relationship with Braintivity, which currently operates the site.
In this regard, Sergio Loredo, director of Tecnocen, reported that Torruco’s statements about an alleged hack of VisitMexico are false and that access to the site was blocked due to lack of payment.
“It is a very unfortunate situation, the Secretary of Tourism and Braintivity came out to say imprecise things, falsehoods. Nothing was hacked, they could no longer enter their accesses and emails because they did not pay for the service,” said the manager in an interview with El Financiero Bloomberg TV.
“The domain is blocked because the Sectur needs to finish a process of proving its identity and this is a long process because it has to send its creation certificate along with documents that guarantee its identity,” he added.
Regarding the translations, he explained that it was the product of the foreign company Relevant Traffic, which can be validated with the system records.
Torruco explained that VisitMexico was the official promotion portal of the Mexico Tourism Promotion Council (CPTM), with an operating cost of six million pesos per year, which maintained alliances with private companies such as BestDay, operating with its reservation engine.
The translation problem came a day after the US State Department cited the high number of COVID-19 cases in Mexico by issuing a “do not travel” warning to the Mexican Republic, which is its highest level. stop warning. Hours earlier, Acapulco was forced to remove ‘anything goes’ tourism advertisements that showed people partying without masks and with the words ‘there are no rules’.
–
