7 ms·

Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion

199 points by zdw 5y ago

dimensi0nal 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Amazon referrals and reviews exhibit a similar pattern
  - dylan604 5y ago
    As long as there is a game, the players will find a way to gain advantage.
  - Larrikin 5y ago
    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.
    - Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
      > I've started noting sites that I trust when looking for reviews and recommendations and always go there first. I normally look into Reddit & YouTube for such reviews because it is always people who have the authentic experience with it. Often I would find people responding to reviews in the comments and it helps to get a different perspective on the products. If it didn't have it, then I go on my trusted review sites.
bhartzer 5y ago
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.
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  Google’s original crème de la crème 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 5y ago
    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.
    - MarcoZavala 5y ago
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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.
larwent 5y ago
The lawyer profile faces instantly give the site a fake vibe as they look like those generated by GANS AI.
- bt1a 5y ago
  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.
  - nsp 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      Along with that, the single texture background always blurry, sometimes with discontinuities are usually a good give away too.
  - sdflhasjd 5y ago
    The teeth and lips is an easy one, noticable on the "Brian Dodd" image. "Chris Donnelly" has weird skin texture around his mouth.
  - larwent 5y ago
    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.
geocrasher 5y ago
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 5y ago
  I wonder how people make money off of this (if they do)
  - djbusby 5y ago
    Pay to remove negative SEO crap maybe?
    - duskwuff 5y ago
      And pay to remove/deindex pages that rank higher than yours.
  - schaefer 5y ago
    Maybe it's about power. Censorship is a form of power.
    - geocrasher 5y ago
      It's about SEO. Taking down competing content.
  - oefrha 5y ago
    Charging money to submit free removal requests has been a thriving business since at least the early days of Web 2.0.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  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-takedown-notice.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/responding-dmca-take...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fleddr 5y ago
I can only confirm that as owner of a moderately visible website, you have a massive target on your back. In my case, it's a niche site about a particular hobby that is relatively successful (within that niche). There's the daily grind of ignoring the obvious affiliate link begging emails. I have a well developed bullshit detector from being on the web since 1996. As it appears, I still wasn't skeptical enough. I get this email written by an old lady explaining how my site brought her grand daughter tremendous joy. It was very well written, and felt very genuine. It had a "realness" to it as it had such an informal style and it clearly wasn't generated as it had detailed, human-selected specifics about my site. Anyway, the request was to have a look at this other site she found. I opened it. It looked OK. Relevant for the field, no obvious visual scam signs, just pretty shallow content. I figured to not do anything. I figured it to just not be that interesting, it still took several days for me to let it sink in that it was another link/scam attempt. I guess I still had some humanity left in me that could be exploited. That is the point I'm getting at: the human damage of all this hostility. You're under constant attack without relief, and can only manage the problem by becoming a monster yourself. Somebody so cynical that they assume every interaction is hostile. And there's the daily cleaning of spammers joining the site. As small site owner, you can't take a break. There's no such things as weekends. It's non-stop. They're not bots, they're people in click farms so there's no mechanism to prevent them from joining. There's the non-stop hack attempts as is evident from web server logs. And the occasional ransomware email. Mind you, I'm talking about a completely non-commercial hobby project. The threat level for even just that is completely disproportional. You're trying to run this small genuine thing yet the world aims to destroy it, every hour of every day. Now scale that up to a large site, or imagine being a Facebook moderator.
- Efimeridopolis 5y ago
  Now you peaked my interest, what's your website?
  - mdavis6890 5y ago
    *piqued
nkozyra 5y ago
What would the response be if you complied but added noindex nofollow to the IMG tag?
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  Probably nothing since you can't noindex or nofollow img tags. If you mean an "a" tag then they would definitely be annoyed but would also probably be confused when they see the "noindex" since that won't do anything
  - nkozyra 5y ago
    The article indicates they were asking for attribution in the form of an anchor tag. rel="noindex" has value, as would "UGC" Likewise the page would could have noindex as top level meta field. But I think you got what I was getting at anyway.
    - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
      I don't think noindex on a backlink will really do anything. But yeah sponsored, UGC, and nofollow all do the same to Google Noindexing the page with the backlink doesn't mean it won't be crawled, it just means it probably won't be indexed so I don't think that will do anything either
      - nkozyra 5y ago
        > it just means it probably won't be indexed so I don't think that will do anything either Of course it would do something, it just wouldn't be the best way to do it. The goal is not to prevent Google from getting to that site, it's to prevent the backlink value of the anchor tag from a good PageRank site. Either way it all seems like you're trying to find a weird quibble here. I was simply presenting two ways to devalue linking as a thought exercise. They would both work.
0x38B 5y ago
They use full forms (“I am”) in the email but then at the end write “we’ll” - not something I’d expect to see in a legal notice!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jamesfisher 5y ago
You should copy-paste the entire email text into your article. The first thing I would do when receiving an email like this is Google a sample of the text, hoping to find something like your post confirming that it's a scam.
- sfoskett 5y ago
  Great idea! I just updated the post with the entire text (unlinked)!
sfoskett 5y ago
OP here. Thanks for the comments and suggestions! I updated the post to include the full text of the email as well as a link to this discussion. I wonder if anyone has any suggestions about what we can do to stop this kind of thing. Should we complain to someone or just warn people online? Is there anything that can be done to head off this kind of thing?

199 points by zdw 5y ago

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 5y ago
Amazon referrals and reviews exhibit a similar pattern
- dylan604 5y ago
  As long as there is a game, the players will find a way to gain advantage.
- Larrikin 5y ago
  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.
  - Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
    > I've started noting sites that I trust when looking for reviews and recommendations and always go there first. I normally look into Reddit & YouTube for such reviews because it is always people who have the authentic experience with it. Often I would find people responding to reviews in the comments and it helps to get a different perspective on the products. If it didn't have it, then I go on my trusted review sites.

bhartzer 5y ago

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.

colejohnson66 5y ago
Google’s original crème de la crème 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 5y ago
  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.
  - MarcoZavala 5y ago
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.

larwent 5y ago

The lawyer profile faces instantly give the site a fake vibe as they look like those generated by GANS AI.

bt1a 5y ago
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.
- nsp 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Along with that, the single texture background always blurry, sometimes with discontinuities are usually a good give away too.
- sdflhasjd 5y ago
  The teeth and lips is an easy one, noticable on the "Brian Dodd" image. "Chris Donnelly" has weird skin texture around his mouth.
- larwent 5y ago
  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.

geocrasher 5y ago

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 5y ago
I wonder how people make money off of this (if they do)
- djbusby 5y ago
  Pay to remove negative SEO crap maybe?
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    And pay to remove/deindex pages that rank higher than yours.
- schaefer 5y ago
  Maybe it's about power. Censorship is a form of power.
  - geocrasher 5y ago
    It's about SEO. Taking down competing content.
- oefrha 5y ago
  Charging money to submit free removal requests has been a thriving business since at least the early days of Web 2.0.
alisonkisk 5y ago
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-takedown-notice.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/responding-dmca-take...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fleddr 5y ago

I can only confirm that as owner of a moderately visible website, you have a massive target on your back. In my case, it's a niche site about a particular hobby that is relatively successful (within that niche). There's the daily grind of ignoring the obvious affiliate link begging emails. I have a well developed bullshit detector from being on the web since 1996. As it appears, I still wasn't skeptical enough. I get this email written by an old lady explaining how my site brought her grand daughter tremendous joy. It was very well written, and felt very genuine. It had a "realness" to it as it had such an informal style and it clearly wasn't generated as it had detailed, human-selected specifics about my site. Anyway, the request was to have a look at this other site she found. I opened it. It looked OK. Relevant for the field, no obvious visual scam signs, just pretty shallow content. I figured to not do anything. I figured it to just not be that interesting, it still took several days for me to let it sink in that it was another link/scam attempt. I guess I still had some humanity left in me that could be exploited. That is the point I'm getting at: the human damage of all this hostility. You're under constant attack without relief, and can only manage the problem by becoming a monster yourself. Somebody so cynical that they assume every interaction is hostile. And there's the daily cleaning of spammers joining the site. As small site owner, you can't take a break. There's no such things as weekends. It's non-stop. They're not bots, they're people in click farms so there's no mechanism to prevent them from joining. There's the non-stop hack attempts as is evident from web server logs. And the occasional ransomware email. Mind you, I'm talking about a completely non-commercial hobby project. The threat level for even just that is completely disproportional. You're trying to run this small genuine thing yet the world aims to destroy it, every hour of every day. Now scale that up to a large site, or imagine being a Facebook moderator.

Efimeridopolis 5y ago
Now you peaked my interest, what's your website?
- mdavis6890 5y ago
  *piqued

nkozyra 5y ago

What would the response be if you complied but added noindex nofollow to the IMG tag?

weird-eye-issue 5y ago
Probably nothing since you can't noindex or nofollow img tags. If you mean an "a" tag then they would definitely be annoyed but would also probably be confused when they see the "noindex" since that won't do anything
- nkozyra 5y ago
  The article indicates they were asking for attribution in the form of an anchor tag. rel="noindex" has value, as would "UGC" Likewise the page would could have noindex as top level meta field. But I think you got what I was getting at anyway.
  - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    I don't think noindex on a backlink will really do anything. But yeah sponsored, UGC, and nofollow all do the same to Google Noindexing the page with the backlink doesn't mean it won't be crawled, it just means it probably won't be indexed so I don't think that will do anything either
    - nkozyra 5y ago
      > it just means it probably won't be indexed so I don't think that will do anything either Of course it would do something, it just wouldn't be the best way to do it. The goal is not to prevent Google from getting to that site, it's to prevent the backlink value of the anchor tag from a good PageRank site. Either way it all seems like you're trying to find a weird quibble here. I was simply presenting two ways to devalue linking as a thought exercise. They would both work.

0x38B 5y ago

They use full forms (“I am”) in the email but then at the end write “we’ll” - not something I’d expect to see in a legal notice!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jamesfisher 5y ago

You should copy-paste the entire email text into your article. The first thing I would do when receiving an email like this is Google a sample of the text, hoping to find something like your post confirming that it's a scam.

sfoskett 5y ago
Great idea! I just updated the post with the entire text (unlinked)!

sfoskett 5y ago

OP here. Thanks for the comments and suggestions! I updated the post to include the full text of the email as well as a link to this discussion. I wonder if anyone has any suggestions about what we can do to stop this kind of thing. Should we complain to someone or just warn people online? Is there anything that can be done to head off this kind of thing?