Over the years, Engadget has become the target of a common SEO scam, where someone claims to own an image and requests a link back to a specific website. Many other websites would tell you the same thing, but now with the help of readily available AI tools, scammers are making fake DMCA takedown notices and threats of legal action look more legitimate.
according to the report of 404Mediawebsite publisher Tiredness received a “copyright infringement notice” via email last week from a law firm called Commonwealth Legal. Like older, similar attempts to trick the recipient, the sender said they were contacting their customer “about the image.” In this case, the sender requested that a “visible and clickable link” to the website “tech4gods” be added under the allegedly stolen image.
Because Tedium was indeed using a photo from a royalty-free provider, the publisher investigated the request, found the law firm’s website, and upon closer inspection realized that their attorneys’ images were generated by AI. whom 404Media notes that the images of lawyers have the blank stares often seen in AI-generated photos. If you do a reverse image search on them, you’ll get results from a website with the URL generated.photos, which uses artificial intelligence to produce “unique, fuss-free model photos… from scratch.” The publisher also found that the law firm’s address, which was supposed to be on the fourth floor of the building, pointed to a one-story building on Google Street View. The owner of tech4gods said he had nothing to do with the scam, but admitted he used to get backlinks for his website.
This is an example of how bad actors can use AI tools to trick and deceive people, and we need to be more careful because cases like this will continue to increase. Reverse image search engines are your friend, but they may not be error free and may not always help. For example, “Deepfakes” have become a big problem in recent years, as bad actors use them not only to create convincing videos and audios. deceive peoplealso spread misinformation online.
