Anti-fraud apps are not enough.
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Edit | Chen Caixian
Ben Dickson, founder of TechTalks and software engineer, recently suffered a scam.
A lawyer, Nicole Palmer, said he had infringed on his client's intellectual property and asked him to sign and link to the content he posted or he would be punished.
After confirming that he had not violated anyone's rights, Ben conducted a reverse investigation. To his surprise, by stripping away the cocoon, he found that the other party was not a person.
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No such person was identified
At the beginning of the investigation, Ben searched for the other person's name, and he found that lawyer Nicole Palmer, who graduated from Columbia University, wrote in her profile that she "specializes in the application and protection of industrial design" and that "her career has been successful for thirty years."
Everything seemed to be quite normal, and the only problem was that the man didn't exist at all. Starting with this fictional character, Ben Dickson also uncovered an online fraud in which the perpetrators allegedly used backlinks to blackmail bloggers and website owners.
He spent most of last week investigating Arthur Davidson, the so-called "law firm" where Nicole worked. The truth he discovers is disturbing enough that it turns out that the crooks have used high technology to set up seemingly legitimate institutions to deceive the victims.
Hopefully, Ben Dickson's record will help raise awareness of self-preservation and protect themselves from scams like this.
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DMCA copyright infringement
On April 13, the lawyer sent Ben a "DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement, in which she identified herself as a trademark attorney at Arthur Davidson Legal Services" and claimed that the copyright to an image Ben used on TechTalks belonged to one of her clients.
"Our customers are happy that their images can be used and shared on the Internet. But use should mark out image sources. She said in the email.
She added that Ben had 7 days to add images and add a link to the homepage of her client website.
"Otherwise, we will be forced to take legal action." She threatened.
The customer's name and website above were deliberately scribbled off, for reasons that will be explained later
The email quoted legal texts and looked professional, but one thing that made Ben feel a little wrong was that the other party attached a link to Imgur. Imgur is a photo-sharing site where anyone can upload images without even setting up a profile. So it's entirely possible that they downloaded the photo from Ben's website, uploaded it to Imgur, and then claimed that their photo had been uploaded before Ben used it.
Ben is a discreet person who usually searches the sources of the images he uses to make sure he is not using anyone's intellectual property without permission. After being warned, Ben is also willing to check the source again, and if it is true that he is wrong, he will be responsible for the other party.
Upon review, as Ben had guessed, the photo did not belong to the customer, but came from Pexels, an online photo library that did not require a license to use. Ben emailed the lawyer back with a link to the image and a Creative Commons license agreement stating that no attribution was required to use the image and asking her to explain why she said the photo was owned by her client.
Then he waited for the rabbit.
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Seemingly normal website
The email sank, the lawyer didn't respond, and Ben asked her the next day if she would give up the case.
Ben began to suspect that this was a ploy in which the lawyer forced someone to insert a backlink in a disguised way to advertise her client's website.
For website makers, it's a great thing to be able to improve their website's ranking in search engines. There happens to be a way to improve the position of a website in the search engine results page, and that is to get a highly authoritative website to link back to the page.
Ben decided to take a closer look at Arthur Davidson's legal services website. The people who built the site were carefully designed, such as the domain name arthurdavidson.com was deliberately chosen, which shows that the site and the company have been around for a long time, giving the impression that the site has a certain history and has existed in the .com era.
According to the website, Arthur Davidson has handled 420 cases since 2009 and won 380 of them, with a success rate of about 90%.
The company's phone number and address at 177 Huntington Avenue are also listed on the site, and there are several other law firms in the building.
The site has a blog with several articles, one of which mentions that infringing on someone else's copyright could result in a $10,000 fine.
The company's introduction page can see the profiles of 18 lawyers, who graduated from Northeastern University, Brown University, Princeton University, Harvard University and other famous universities. But unlike other professional websites, none of these lawyers posted their personal pages on LinkedIn.
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Domain name that was put on hold
The deeper the investigation, the more parts of the iceberg emerge. Ben, for example, consulted the domain name records of fake law firm websites on the internet corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Apparently, the company has been open for 13 years, but didn't decide to build its own domain name until February 2022.
Ben then looked up the site's history on Wayback Machine (Website Archives, archive.org). It is clear that this domain name has been on hold between 2005 and 2022 .
(It's possible that the law firm may have used another domain name and only recently acquired arthurdavidson.com from its former owner.) ）
He then Googled the company, and it stands to reason that a company with so many high-profile lawyers and winning "multi-million dollar" lawsuits for clients should be in the news at least a few times.
The result was no result.
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GANs generate faces
Almost certainly this was a scam, and Ben took a closer look at the Law Firm Profile page. The photos of the lawyers don't seem quite right. So he opened Nicole's picture and zoomed in.
He then discovered that this was actually an image created by a generative adversarial network (GAN), a deep learning model that can be trained to create faces, works of art, or anything else.
Photo of Nicole Palmer, a fake lawyer at a fake law firm (with TRACES OF GAN synthesis in the red circle)
GANs have made great strides since they were invented in 2014. Now GANs produce higher resolution and more natural and realistic images than in the early days. There's a website called This Person Does Not Exist that generates GAN faces, and some of them are pretty seamless.
However, if you are familiar with GAN technology, you can easily notice some artificially generated traces, because there are some irregularities that are obviously wrong, such as earrings, shadows on the sides of the face, the edges of hair and beard, wrinkles, the edges of eyebrows, and the edges of glasses.
GAN face with obvious synthetic marks
With sufficient evidence, Ben contacted the client Nicole represented and asked them to explain his relationship to the fake law firm. On April 18, a customer service agent replied that they had nothing to do with the law firm.
Soon after, the fake law firm's website was shut down, but it was still visible on Wayback Machine.
Although Ben suspected that the client was all related to the false law, he decided not to delve further into it because there was no conclusive evidence.
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Stay tuned for the network
The fake law firm website may have been managed by a grey hat SEO team. They're not good at the moment, but they may soon make a comeback under another name.
What they do is not difficult. Such an online scam only requires copying the websites of some regular law firms, a few free DMCA email templates, a few GAN-generated faces (with ready-made websites), some web design knowledge, and spending a little money on a phone number and a domain name. They also used social engineering strategies to create a sense of urgency (e.g., seven-day deadlines, legal sanctions, etc.) to scare victims into acting in a hurry.
Ben hopes his findings will help people avoid falling victim to scams like this. All the tools he used to investigate are free, easy to use, and everyone can try them out for themselves. Don't panic if you encounter something like this. Investigate and deal with it well, nothing will happen.
For companies that are considering using this scam service, Ben's advice is: Don't do it. There is no shortcut to gaining authority on the Internet, and you can only gradually develop yourself by creating excellent content. Some shady shortcuts can only do more harm than good to your website and business.
https://bdtechtalks.com/2022/04/21/gan-lawyers-arthur-davidson-scam/
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