IT news site 404 Media discovered that a DMCA notice sent by a non-existent law firm turned out to be an SEO scam that boosted its client's ranking in search results by providing backlinks to the client's website. He reported that he promised to improve it.
AI-generated lawyer “law firm” sends fake threats as SEO scam
https://www.404media.co/a-law-firm-of-ai-generated-lawyers-is-sending-fake-threats-as-an-seo-scam/
A new SEO scam that combines generative AI and the classic threat of legal action was discovered when Ernie Smith, administrator of the news site Tedium, received an email titled “Notification of Copyright Infringement.” Ta.
The email, sent by a law firm called Commonwealth Legal, said it was “contacting us on behalf of the intellectual property department of a well-known company regarding images related 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 emails apart from your run-of-the-mill spam is that they don't request that images be removed or , rather than threatening legal action, instead requests a link to a site called “Tech4Gods.com.”
So Smith checked out.
I went to Commonwealth Legal's website, and all the lawyer profile pictures there had blank, unfocused eyes, the kind of expression you often see on sites that generate fictitious faces.
Additionally, searches for the attorney's name in attorney databases and LinkedIn yielded no results. The only clue was a site called “Generated.Photos,'' a facial photo generation service that came up when I searched for facial images.
“All of these scanned faces were likely generated by AI, such as generative adversarial network (GAN) models,” said Ali Shahriyari, co-founder and CTO of AI detection startup Reality Defender, 404 Media told.
The address Smith found for Commonwealth Legal on Google Street View is a one-story building that bears no resemblance to photos of the building on the official website, and all phone numbers listed are out of range. There was also no response. Contact the company via the contact form.
When Smith learned that the DMCA notice had been sent by a defunct law firm, he realized it was a fake attempt to get people to link to his website and improve its ranking in Google search results. I realized that the link was a scam.
The email in question attempted to link to Tech4Gods.com, a gadget review site run by a man named Daniel Birchak.site
says, “Complement our commitment to quality content with an AI writing assistant.”
The images Smith allegedly infringed were downloaded from royalty-free image sites.
Unsplash.
When 404 Media contacted Burchak directly about this matter, he said, “Certainly I do not own the image.''
According to Mr. Burchak, he previously purchased backlink I visited his site for SEO purposes and had no idea about the scam email.
A “backlink” is a link from an external site. Search engines such as Google tend to consider pages with many external links to have high quality content, so a method called “'' is used. link building “'', which aims to acquire as many external links as possible, is often used as an SEO strategy.
“I don't know about the email, and it certainly has nothing to do with me, but someone has recently been spamming me with links to my site, and I'm dealing with it,” Burchak said. ” he said. “I know about SEO, but I don't have the time, so I buy backlinks.” I had a bad link broker in the past and I stopped doing business with that person, so he wanted to get back at me. I think you are doing something like this. ”
Links from low-quality sites can actually lower a site's page rank, but since Smith is a well-known technology blogger, links from Tedium are ranked favorably by search engine algorithms. 404 Media points out that this is highly likely.
404 Media also commented on the incident, saying, “What's interesting about this scam is that it's relatively new and pretends to be a legal threat that website operators often see.” The rise in these types of scams suggests that there is no end in sight to SEO scams. ”