ctrl+cIn this article, I show you that the requests entitled “DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice” received by email are scams. I will explain what motivates scammers to prepare such an elaborate scam.
If you receive an email entitled “DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice,” don’t panic. It’s just a scam. Unlike the case of Picrights, whose practices are questionable but whose legal basis has a semblance of reality, emails entitled “DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice” are nothing more than an elaborate scam. But why? To forcefully extract… backlinks. I explain it all in this article.
“DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice”: a suspicious email
After setbacks with the Swiss company PicRights, I’ve become very attentive to copyright and authors’ rights. All images posted on this site are done by first acquiring the rights (and therefore paying for them, most of the time). So, when I received an email, a few days ago entitled “DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice,” I might as well tell you that I reread it twice before acting.
Here’s the email in question.
It looks remarkably similar to those sent out by “Copyrights Trolls,” such as PicRights, so it’s safe to assume that this is where they got their inspiration.
An elaborate scam
The people behind this scam went as far as creating a website for this fake company. The site may look like an illusion for anyone not accustomed to visiting lawyers’ websites. But it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
The lawyers’ photos could not be more suspicious. They are strangely in the same style and again attract suspicion.
They don’t stand up to scrutiny, and a reverse search soon reveals that the photos have been generated by artificial intelligence. So Ruby Hall and her colleagues Ava Campbell and Noah Carter don’t exist.
Warning signs
The email contains several warning signs that a trained eye should easily spot.
First, the company whose rights have allegedly been infringed has no reason to claim rights to an image as banal as the one referenced in the email. As I’ve already explained about PicRights, an image must be original for its author to claim compensation in the event of “non-conforming” use. This is a loophole in the well-oiled system of Copyrights Trolls; in this case, this image is utterly banal.
The image for which rights are claimed is bland and devoid of originality. It’s immediately obvious that it’s an image from a background of royalty-free photos
The image for which rights are claimed is bland and devoid of originality. It’s immediately obvious that it’s an image from a background of royalty-free photos [/caption]
Another red flag should be the company claiming rights to this image: “Dubai SIM cards – Wifi Guide.” First, this name can’t be that of a company (what does “Wifi Guide” have to do with it?). Secondly, it’s unlikely that a company selling SIM cards would own rights to images in general and to images of this nature in particular.
Then, the claim is displayed in this email. Insert a hyperlink, and you’ll be free of any risk of prosecution. Really? What company owning the rights to an image would allow you to get away with that? Isn’t this a new kind of scam?
Why this scam?
This email is a “black hat” technique to retrieve hyperlinks. And unfortunately, some people fall for it despite all the warning signs. A quick search on Ahrefs shows that the Dubaisims site has recovered 52 to-follow backlinks in the last 30 days. The sites that have been fooled sometimes have quite a significant Domain Ranking (DR) (up to 80).
Ahrefs analysis shows that scammers have managed to steal 52 backlinks in the last 30 days from gullible website operators [/caption]
This article will help you avoid being duped if you receive a similar email.
Posted in Data & IT.