Scammers play a long game using bogus, AI-backed 'law firm'
A new artificial intelligence-backed scam is as multi-faceted and lengthy as it is unconvincing — at least for would-be victims who dig below the surface.
I recently received a threatening “DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice” email from an alleged law firm claiming that a Cointelegraph article had used a copyrighted stock image owned by a vague cryptocurrency firm, the name of which I will refrain from sharing so as not to boosti its online credibility.
The first problem? The purported image wasn’t even present in the article. Still, the "law firm" sent a second email several hours later, reciting the same threats and reusing the same image. This time, however, it was allegedl working on behalf of a different and equally nebulous, AI-backed crypto platform.
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The entity behind the threat was demanding that Cointelegraph link to its website. Such "backlinking" is a practice that Google rewards with heightened visibility in search results. The perpetrators of this particular scam are apparently attempting to dupe busy news editors into providing links for their bogus website.
In this case, the threat came from an “Alicia Weber,” a purported employee for “Nationwide Legal Services.” Weber gave me five days to provide a link to her website before I was staring down a copyright lawsuit. (The "law firm," coincidentally, uses a .site domain — the first red flag.)
Something was obviously off. This was clearly some new type of scam. Weber claimed that “simply removing the image [would] not rectify the issue." (Generally speaking, from a legal perspective, it would.) She demanded that I include a link to the “notable entity” and “prominent organization” she
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