Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion
blog.fosketts.net
blog.fosketts.net
https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/responding-dmca-takedown-no...
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/responding-dmca-take...
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.
I feel you. I have a server exposed to the internet, and pretty much the only thing in my access log is PHP/cPanel/MySQL exploit attempts. My guess is that you just port scan the entire internet and go fishing.
Not that this is much consolation, but keep in mind that it's not the world that aims to destroy your small genuine thing, but instead a tiny army of unscrupulous jerks.
You're of course right about bad actors not representing "the world", but when 99% of interactions is hostile, one's perception of reality changes.
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.
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.
(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:
> 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.
They have an office in harvard square..
- 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".
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.
“ Hannah has spent the past twelve years making New York City his home.”
* 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?
https://taylorwilsonsmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/lad...
I thought it was the worst one as well
More simply: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once you use it to determine how much money somebody makes"
Although I guess then they'd send out fake DMCA takedowns requesting people put links to their competitors...
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.
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?
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.
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
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.