A new case of 'SEO fraud' using AI-generated fake lawyers and fake DMCA notices is reported
404 Media, an IT news site, reports that a DMCA notice sent by a non-existent law firm turned out to be an SEO scam, promising to boost the client's ranking in search results by providing backlinks to the client's website.
A 'Law Firm' of AI Generated Lawyers Is Sending Fake Threats as an SEO Scam
The new SEO scam, which combines generative AI with the classic threat of legal action, was discovered when Ernie Smith, the administrator of the news site Tedium, received an email titled 'Notice of Copyright Infringement.'
The email, sent by a law firm called Commonwealth Legal, said they were 'contacting us on behalf of a well-known company's intellectual property department regarding imagery relevant to our client.'
According to 404 Media, emails like this one about copyright issues with images on websites are common, but what sets Commonwealth Legal's email apart from run-of-the-mill spam is that instead of demanding the image be removed or threatening legal action, it instead asks for a link to a site called 'Tech4Gods.com.'
So Smith checked out
Furthermore, searching for the lawyers' names in lawyer databases or on LinkedIn did not return any results. The only clue was a site called 'Generated.Photos,' a facial photo generation service, which came up when doing an image search for their faces.
'It's highly likely that all of these scanned faces were generated by AI, such as a generative adversarial network (GAN) model,' Ali Shahriyari, co-founder and CTO of AI detection startup Reality Defender, told 404 Media.
The address that Smith found for Commonwealth Legal on Google Street View was a single-storey building that bore no resemblance to the photos of the building on the official website, and all of the phone numbers were out of service, with no response to any attempts to contact the company via a contact form.
After discovering that the DMCA notice was being sent by a defunct law firm, Smith realized it was a backlink scam trying to get people to link to his website and boost his ranking in Google search results.
The email in question was trying to link to Tech4Gods.com, a gadget review site run by a man named Daniel Birchak. The site
The image that Smith allegedly infringed was an image that he downloaded from the royalty-free image site
When 404 Media contacted Mr. Birchak directly about this, he stated, 'I am certainly not the owner of that image.'
According to Birchak, he had previously purchased backlinks to his site for SEO purposes, but had no knowledge of the scam email.
A 'backlink' is a link from an external site. Search engines such as Google tend to view pages with many external links as having high quality content, so a technique called ' link building ' that tries to acquire as many external links as possible is often used as an SEO measure.
'I'm not aware of the emails and they certainly have nothing to do with me, but someone has been spamming links to my site recently and I'm dealing with that,' Birchak said. 'I know SEO but I don't have the time, so I buy backlinks. I had a lousy link broker in the past and I stopped doing business with him, so I think he's doing this to get back at me.'
While links from lower-quality sites can actually lower a site's page rank, 404 Media points out that because Smith is a well-known tech blogger, a link from Tedium is more likely to be favorably ranked by search engine algorithms.
404 Media also commented on the case, saying, 'What's interesting about this scam is that it's relatively new and disguises itself as a legal threat that website operators often see. The rise of this type of scam suggests that there appears to be no end to these SEO scams.'
Related Posts:
in Note, Posted by log1l_ks