I doubt websites hosted in Eastern Europe care about copyright legal threats. Even if they contact the hosting provider directly I doubt any action will be take

I doubt websites hosted in Eastern Europe care about copyright legal threats. Even if they contact the hosting provider directly I doubt any action will be taken. Eastern Europe has plenty of cheap, shady hosting providers where you can host pretty much anything that you want. Unless the website is making a lot of money, nobody is going to spend significant resources to take those websites down. Let me speculate of why they might be doing it. Google will de-rank pages that have content that's identical to others (e.g. identical paragraphs of text). Maybe Facebook is doing something similar? Let's say one of your friends shares an article from BuzzFeed.com, then another friend shares an exact clone of this article from FakeBuzzFeed.com. Now, Facebook might not want to show two articles with the same title from two different websites on your timeline. And considering that BuzzFeed.com is a website with a higher ranking that FakeBuzzFeed.com, it will probably choose to display only the fist one. If you do the Cyrillic trick to the article in FakeBuzzFeed.com, Facebook will think it's something completely different and present it to you, thus getting you a higher reach. The same applies to the advertising part: if you're constantly submitting page ads with exactly the same titles as the one's that real users are sharing, it might get you banned.