Fake AI-Generated Law Firms Sent Fake DMCA Notices to Increase SEO

March 1, 2024

In March 2024, a deceptive practice involving AI emerged when fake law firms using generated identities sent fraudulent DMCA takedown notices to website owners. These entities, such as 'Commonwealth Legal', employed GAN models for realistic attorney images and fabricated bios. The scam exploited AI technology by issuing false legal threats to coerce site owners into adding backlinks, highlighting the need for safe and secure AI practices in SEO. **For those interested in shaping governance and guardrails for trustworthy AI practices, JOIN US.** This incident underscores the importance of HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM's Measure function in identifying and mitigating such incidents.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
unknown-scammers, commonwealth-legal
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-creators
Alleged harmed parties
website-owners, website-operators, ernie-smith

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/717

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.