[HN Gopher] Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion
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Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion
Author : zdw
Score : 124 points
Date : 2022-01-24 17:59 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.fosketts.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.fosketts.net)
| larwent wrote:
| The lawyer profile faces instantly give the site a fake vibe as
| they look like those generated by GANS AI.
| bt1a wrote:
| What characteristics signal this to you? I took a glance at the
| lawyers'* photos and can't easily determine that they're AI
| generated. I probably wouldn't give it a second thought if I
| didn't know ahead of time that they were generated.
| Antipode wrote:
| Hannah Shields' left (our right) earring is particularly
| egregious.
| nsp wrote:
| I'm not great at this but in general - Eyes exactly centered
| in the middle of the photo - Earlobes/ears are different,
| e.g. attached vs unattached lobe on either side - Boundaries
| of hair are confused/fuzzy
| simcop2387 wrote:
| Along with that, the single texture background always
| blurry, sometimes with discontinuities are usually a good
| give away too.
| tyingq wrote:
| "Kara Morgan" has mismatched earrings. That's typical.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| The teeth and lips is an easy one, noticable on the "Brian
| Dodd" image. "Chris Donnelly" has weird skin texture around
| his mouth.
| larwent wrote:
| It's the typical GANS face layout, with a blurry background,
| eyes centered and cropped to the face. It's certainly
| possible those are could be real people, but in my experience
| law firms _usually_ have upper-body shots of the lawyers with
| their arms folded, or standing together as a team or with a
| client.
|
| I wouldn't catch these at first glance, but the older
| gentleman specifically stands out to me with the
|
| 1. tuft of hair above the right eyebrow
|
| 2. teeth far offset from center
|
| 3. soap-bubble colored noise around the hair features
|
| These aren't unusual on their own (except #3 maybe) but all
| together they make the photo seem fake.
| hwers wrote:
| A really easy clue (as is the case on that site) is if the
| location of the eyes are aligned almost perfectly as if to
| the pixel.
| gruez wrote:
| I remember seeing a guide on how to detect generated faces,
| and the signs to look for were:
|
| * glasses looking weird (ie. the inside of the frame not
| matching with the rest of the face, or optical effects not
| being replicated)
|
| * hair
|
| * teeth
|
| I looked at the pictures and they look reasonably real. Maybe
| the neural networks gotten better?
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| weq wrote:
| In each scam group, a member of team specialises in, making
| websites, for instance. Others are good at phishing, talking
| like a call center worker, and the list goes on. The info on
| how todo this is sold on dark web. So those scammers likely
| didnt even build these fake websites, they bought the
| templates.
| sacrosancty wrote:
| It really doesn't matter how obvious it is if you follow the
| easiest rule of not getting scammed:
|
| - If anyone initiates contact with you, don't trust any claims
| they make about their identity.
|
| If you only trust real law firms, verify that independently
| with whatever authority determines which law firms are real.
| People need to stop using "can make a professional-looking
| website" as a proxy for "not a scammer".
| greenyoda wrote:
| You don't even need to look at the faces to see that the site
| is fake. Look at the phone number on this page:
| https://taylorwilsonsmith.com/contact
|
| (212) 555-1979
|
| The 555 prefix is used for directory assistance or for
| fictitious phone numbers (e.g., in movies):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number)
|
| When I called the number, I got the expected intercept message:
| "We're sorry, your call can not be completed as dialed..."
|
| It gets even better... If you search for the two phone numbers
| on that page together, you'll find them on a whole bunch of
| sites, all presumably fake businesses:
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=(800)+555-2840&ia=web
| DaveExeter wrote:
| That's the contact info for Mason Donald King!
|
| https://www.masondonaldking.com/
| tzs wrote:
| It gets even better. On the front page of Taylor Wilson
| Smith it says
|
| > Davis Robbins is a leading independent international law
|
| When they were making their fake Taylor Wilson Smith site
| someone apparently had a copy paste error and included some
| text from their fake David Robbins site [1].
|
| The fake Taylor Wilson Smith firm and the fake Mason Donald
| King firm both say they are at One Penn Plaza, New York, NY
| 10119. It is easy to find the tenant list for that building
| and there is, or course, no tenants with either of those
| names.
|
| Another thing they botched when making up these firms is
| that _none_ of the fake attorneys at Taylor Wilson Smith
| are named Taylor, Wilson, or Smith. Similar for the fake
| attorneys at Mason Donald King.
|
| Davis Robbins, which has the same fake phone numbers as the
| other two, is at least at a different address, 12 Fremont
| Ave, Staten Island, NY 10306.
|
| That's not even an office. It's a single-family house in a
| residential neighborhood.
|
| Like the other two fake firms, none of their fake attorneys
| match the names of the firm.
|
| [1] https://www.davisrobbins.com/
| acomjean wrote:
| Dewey, Cheatham and Howe.
|
| They have an office in harvard square..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey,_Cheatem_%26_Howe
| greenyoda wrote:
| Also, how many real law firms specialize both in
| copyright litigation and divorce? Yet the TWS, MDK and DR
| firms all do - and they just happen to have exactly the
| same list of six Practice Areas. The three sites were all
| hastily cloned from the same template. Not very
| convincing at all.
| DaveExeter wrote:
| Invent your own law firm!
|
| https://demo.bizbudding.com/achieve-law/
| geocrasher wrote:
| I work in hosting. A large number of DMCA requests that I've seen
| are very nearly scams. All somebody has to do is not like content
| that you host, claim copyright, and issue a DMCA takedown
| request. The onus is on the site owner to prove that they own the
| material and file a counterclaim. It's often easier for them to
| just take the content down, sadly.
| hwers wrote:
| I wonder how people make money off of this (if they do)
| djbusby wrote:
| Pay to remove negative SEO crap maybe?
| duskwuff wrote:
| And pay to remove/deindex pages that rank higher than
| yours.
| schaefer wrote:
| Maybe it's about power. Censorship is a form of power.
| geocrasher wrote:
| It's about SEO. Taking down competing content.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Not true. There is no onus on the site owner or anyone else to
| prove they own the material before filing a counterclaim.
|
| https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/responding-dmca-take...
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Are you referring to scams where they don't hold copywrite?
| bhartzer wrote:
| To fix this, Google needs to stop relying on links as a search
| engine ranking factor--or at least not rely on it as much.
| mountainb wrote:
| They will never stop doing this. They have stopped relying on
| it as much (by changing how sites are scored based on perceived
| authority), but it just shifts the manipulation techniques
| accordingly.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Google's original creme de la creme is PageRank: the idea that
| links to your page have more weight than keyword spam. They
| don't seem to want to abandon that idea.
| not2b wrote:
| They can't; the web is too large to work without it, and it
| is (legitimate) links that make it possible to distinguish a
| well-known site from a pop-up plagiarist that just copies all
| of the text. But for it to work on the modern web you need to
| be able to distinguish high-quality links from bogus link-
| farm links.
| reincarnate0x14 wrote:
| It's more that they seem unwillingly to admit that purely
| automated methods don't achieve optimal results when
| they're being fought by equally automated scams. They could
| bump their overall ranking quality significantly by
| blacklisting known bad-actors that scrape real sites and
| put up hollow shells of barely edited, machine-munged
| plagiarism, yet do not.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| If anyone can combat it, Google can. It doesn't seem that
| hard to me to assign low (or negative) weight to links that
| suddenly appear on a page that hasn't otherwise changed in
| years, for example. Or links to the same site on pages that
| otherwise have nothing to do with each other in terms of
| content/subject. I'm sure it's harder than that, but all
| those engineers ought to be earning their six figure
| salaries.
| Cymen wrote:
| But how do you translate that into (short term) OKRs and
| work that engineers can build a career upon as an
| achievement (for promotion)? I think there is a cultural
| mismatch between how engineers grow and what they work on
| at Google versus the quality of the search results. There
| seems to be very limit upside and huge potential downside
| to working on this at Google.
|
| That said, I don't work for Google and my conjecture is
| based on the hand wavy details (from engineers that
| do/have) posted online.
| MarcoZavala wrote:
| ronsor wrote:
| _Because of stuff like this_ Google doesn 't rely on links much
| any more, but these scammers and SEO nuts aren't going to stop
| because of that fact. To them, they just need more links to
| make up for it.
| nightpool wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
|
| More simply: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to
| collapse once you use it to determine how much money somebody
| makes"
| notahacker wrote:
| Blacklisting everyone who did this from their index would be a
| start
|
| Although I guess then they'd send out fake DMCA takedowns
| requesting people put links to their competitors...
| dimensi0nal wrote:
| The entire shady industry that exists because of Google's search
| algorithm always amazes me. It's just layers and layers of
| deception (even "normal" SEO, too).
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Amazon referrals and reviews exhibit a similar pattern
| dylan604 wrote:
| As long as there is a game, the players will find a way to
| gain advantage.
| Larrikin wrote:
| I've started noting sites that I trust when looking for
| reviews and recommendations and always go there first. If
| it's a site I'm unfamiliar with, I glance through the links.
| If they are all Amazon links I just move on without bothering
| to read any of their justifications.
|
| Nearly all the time it's just crap talking about a product
| the "reviewer" hasn't even used, but has good reviews on
| Amazon or some other junk.
|
| It's not a perfect system, most Serious eats articles would
| not make it through, but it's been helpful in avoiding total
| crap.
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2022-01-24 23:02 UTC)