Fake DMCA Requests Using AI Generated Lawyers To Demand Links

Here is a newish link scheme, well, not 100% new but parts of it is new. As reported by The Next Web, these link spammers are using AI to create fake lawyer profiles that are going around sending fake DMCA requests demanding a link to their site for the use of content or images.

We’ve probably all seen DMCA notices but this specific one came from Nicole Palmer at Arthur Davidson Legal, a lawyer who does not really exist but was generated using AI. Here is the email:

The reporter when on to say “Almost sure that this was a scam, I took a closer look at the “About Us” page. The photos of the lawyers seemed a bit out of place. I opened Nicole’s photo in full size on a separate tab. What I saw was an image created by a generative adversarial network, a deep learning model that can be trained to create faces, art, or anything else.”

You can see the photo is not right:

The lengths some SEOs go to in order to get links…

Glenn Gabe summed it up nicely on Twitter:

“But GANs still create unnatural artifacts that can be easily detected if you’re familiar w/the tech. You can easily spot irregularities in places such as earrings, shadings on the side of the face, edge of hair & beard, wrinkles, borders of eyebrows, & the sides of eyeglasses.” pic.twitter.com/kFvkVWMnqQ

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) April 24, 2022

Did you get one of these? Some have…

Wow, very interesting! How did you respond? And did you notice anything off with the firm, the request, the photos, etc.? I’m sure that tricked a number of site owners.

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) April 24, 2022

Gotta admit, though, I kinda figured the law firm was being bamboozled by the client. Clearly I was wrong! I bet at least 50% of the sites put up the back link. Would be interesting to review the site back link profile in SEMRush.

— Nicole Gustas (@rednikki) April 24, 2022

Forum discussion at Twitter.