AI-Powered Fake Copyright Trolling Threat Letters Really Just An SEO Scam

This headline is like a version of Mad Libs for Techdirt titles.

We've been covering the problem of copyright trolls for many years. And lately, we've been covering the scammy uses of generative AI tools. And we've absolutely covered quite a few SEO scam stories, where people try to use some scam or another to influence search results.

But here's a story that has all three.

It starts with a Fediverse thread from Ernie Smith from the website Tedium (which is worth following, by the way). He received a DMCA email, claiming that an image on Tedium violated someone's copyright:

But, as Ernie quickly noted, the image is actually from Unsplash, a stock photography website where images are freely usable under the site's license. There are some other oddities in the threat letter as well. First, just the fact that it comes from a trademark attorney" seems weird, given that it's a copyright issue. But, even more strange is that they don't ask for the image to be removed or even for payment. Rather, all they want is for a link to some random site?

Ernie looked at the webpage for the supposed law firm," Commonwealth Legal Services," which looks not just stupidly generic:

But the part showing its lawyers looks very obviously created using artificial intelligence.

Ernie also looked up the address of the supposed law firm, and it looks, well, pretty different from the image on their website.

So, it quickly becomes clear that this is just an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings through deceptive means. It's just an SEO scam. It is trying to trick bloggers into adding links to random websites through threats of copyright infringement claims.

Such fake claims come in all the time. We used to get them semi-regularly, though it's been a while since the last time I saw one.

Four years ago, we actually saw something similar, where SEO scammers used surreptitious Wikipedia changes to claim copyright on Wikimedia Commons images, and to demand links to spam websites. But this one is a bit different, in that it's now added in fake AI lawyers to the mix.

Jason Koebler at 404 Media confirmed that the lawyers" on the Commonwealth page are AI-generated. He also confirmed that Commonwealth's supposed phone numbers are disconnected and not in service. On top of that, he actually spoke to the operator of the website that the bogus threat letter demanded a link back to, who insisted that he wasn't behind this, even as it appears he has experimented with spammy SEO techniques in the past.

Barczak told me that he had been previously buying backlinks to his website for SEO, but said he wasn't aware of who was doing this or why. I have no idea; it certainly has nothing to do with me," he said. However, recently, someone has been building spammy links against my site that I have been dealing with."

I have mastered on-page SEO, but unfortunately, I buy links due to a lack of time," he added. In the past, I had a bad link builder. I wonder if it's him going mad at me for letting him go ... It's hard to say the web is massive, and everyone can link whenever they want." Link building is an SEO strategy devised to get outside websites to link to your website.

He added that bad links may damage [the site's] profile in Google's eyes." In this case, however, the lawyers" were threatening a well-established tech blogger, and a link from Tedium would likely be treated as a positive in the search algorithm's eyes.

Meanwhile, Kevin Purdy at Ars Technica pointed out that Commonwealth's website was only registered on March 1st of this year.

Stories like these are among the reasons we find copyright trolling so insidious and problematic. Copyright remains the one legal tool that most people have to threaten site owners to get content removed from websites. Copyright threats (both real and imagined) have become so common that just about everyone understands the threats associated with them.

Add to that the eye-popping amounts that most people have heard regarding copyright-related court awards and settlements. When most unsophisticated people receive a threat, they pay attention. So, the scam is just shifting slightly here, by using the broken copyright system as a wedge to try to get something else entirely: spammy SEO backlinks.

And, when combined with AI-generated fake lawyers, it gives it at least a semblance of legitimacy for unsophisticated recipients. This story is only making news because Ernie knew enough to know this was all bullshit, and then was able to do the initial investigation and then post online about it.