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A ‘LAW FIRM’ OF AI GENERATED LAWYERS IS SENDING FAKE THREATS AS AN SEO SCAM

Jason Koebler
· Apr 4, 2024 at 10:14 AM
Backlink scams are now leveraging fake, AI-generated 'lawyers' and DMCA trolling
to try to pressure site owners to link to their 'clients.'
Collage of Commonwealth's website and its 'lawyers'

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Last week, Ernie Smith, the publisher of the website Tedium, got a “copyright
infringement notice” from a law firm called Commonwealth Legal: “We’re reaching
out on behalf of the Intellectual Property division of a notable entity, in
relation to an image connected to our client,” it read. 

I am familiar with these sorts of emails, which are frightening to get. In an
earlier, wilder day of media, it was relatively common for news websites to use
images that were tagged as “Creative Commons” on Flickr and sites like it. But
some of these images were improperly tagged by the people who uploaded them,
which wasn’t always the person who originally took the photo. This led to a
series of expensive lawsuits, or the threat of lawsuits which led to expensive
settlements, for media companies who did this. Both VICE and BuzzFeed, for
example, deleted thousands of photos from old articles apparently to ward off
copyright lawsuits. 

In this case, though, the email didn’t demand that the photo be taken down or
specifically threaten a lawsuit. Instead, it demanded that Smith place a
“visible and clickable link” beneath the photo in question to a website called
“tech4gods” or the law firm would “take action.” Smith began looking into the
law firm. And he found that Commonwealth Legal is not real, and that the images
of its “lawyers” are AI generated. 

An email from Will Thomas, a "trademark attorney," threatening Tedium.

The threat to "activate the case No. 86342" is obviously nonsense. Beyond that,
Commonwealth Legal’s website looks generic and is full of stock photos, though
I’ve seen a lot of generic template websites for real law firms. All of its
lawyers have vacant, thousand-yard stares that are commonly generated by
websites like This Person Does Not Exist, none of them come up in any attorney
or LinkedIn searches, and the only reverse image search results for them are for
a now-broken website called Generated.Photos, which offered a service to “use AI
to generate people online that don’t exist, change clothing and modify face and
body traits. Download generated people in different postures.”


The "Our Lawyers" section of Commonwealth's website

"All of the faces scanned were likely AI generated, most likely by a Generative
Adversarial Network (GAN) model,” Ali Shahriyari, cofounder and CTO of the AI
detection startup Reality Defender told 404 Media. 

Commonwealth Legal’s listed address is the fourth floor of a one-story building
that looks nothing like the image on its website, and both of its phone numbers
are disconnected. No one responded to the contact form that I filled out. 

The Google Streetview of the one-story building in which Commonwealth apparently
has an office on the fourth floor.

Smith realized that what’s happening here isn’t a copyright enforcement or
copyright trolling attempt at all. Instead, it’s a backlink SEO scam, where a
website owner tries to improve their Google ranking by asking, paying, or
threatening someone to link to their website. 

Tech4Gods.com is a gadget review website run by a man named Daniel Barczak,
whose content is “complemented by AI writing assistants.” In this case, the
photo that Smith had “infringed” was a photo downloaded from the royalty free,
free-to-use website Unsplash, which 404 Media also sometimes uses. The image was
not taken by Barczak, and has nothing to do with him, he told me in an email: “I
certainly don't own any images on the web,” he said. The original photographer
did not respond to a request for comment sent through Unsplash.

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. 

This is a relatively new but insidious scam because it has the look and feel of
a legal threat, and is similar to legal threats that websites get all the time.
On Reddit, I found several people saying they had been targeted with similar
copyright backlink scams, and last month, one Redditor posted specifically that
they had gotten a copyright backlink request from a law firm claiming to
represent Tech4Gods. A blogger who writes about education for teachers uncovered
a similar scam from the nonexistent Arthur Davidson Law Firm in 2022. The rise
of this tactic indicates that there is seemingly no bottom for SEO scams like
this. 

Become a paid subscriber for unlimited, ad-free articles and access to bonus
content. This site is funded by subscribers and you will be directly powering
our journalism.
About the author
Jason is a cofounder of 404 Media. He was previously the editor-in-chief of
Motherboard. He loves the Freedom of Information Act and surfing.
More from Jason Koebler


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Shareholders Sue AI Weapon-Detecting Company, Allege It 'Does Not Reliably
Detect Knives or Guns'
Evolv, which will be used by the NYC subway, is under investigation by the FTC
and SEC, and also had to retract a claim that the UK government validated its
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