Bad Reviews: How Companies Are Using Fake Websites to Censor Content

In my previous blog posts, I discussed some of the most common (legal and not so legal) approaches to removing unwanted material from review sites, as well as Google’s search results. Thanks to protections put in place to allow for freedom of speech in the United States, there are very few ways to go about this in a legal manner. Without a legitimate claim of defamation, copyright infringement, or some other clear violation of the law, businesses are limited in their abilities to remove negative reviews and the search results linking to them.

Faced with these limitations, some companies have gone to extreme lengths to fraudulently claim copyright ownership over a negative review in the hopes of taking it down.

The focus of today’s blog post is on a lesser-known scam which has gained considerable popularity over the past few years, the DMCA “stolen article” scam, which has typically played out as follows:

A company (or individual) will come across some undesirable content online, which they believe will cause them reputational harm. Desperate to censor the content at any cost, and lacking a valid case for defamation, they will often seek the assistance of a “reputation management” agency. These agencies will proceed to create a website masquerading as a legitimate news source, whose sole purpose is to host the very content their client is seeking to remove, usually disguised in the form of a news article. The article is then backdated to give it the appearance of being published prior to the allegedly infringing content. The reputation management agency then files a DMCA notice on behalf of the “journalist” who wrote the review, claiming it was stolen from their client’s website, all the while shielding the true client’s name with an alias designed to make it difficult to trace back to them.

The technique was highly publicized by The Guardian in May 2016 when it exposed a London-based building firm, which was using the tactic to successfully remove a negative review from the Mumsnet discussion board. The firm was also able to convince Google to delist the entire forum discussion from its search results. The company in question, BuildTeam, is alleged to have copied a disgruntled customer’s review to the “home improvement’ website gotohomestay.com onto a webpage vaguely resembling a news article.

Gotohomestay.com's homepage

Mumsnet user “Daisy123abc” originally posted the review on December 26, 2015 after her bedroom ceiling collapsed on Christmas day as a result of BuildTeam’s construction work. Five months later, she received a DMCA notice from an individual by the name of “Douglas Bush” claiming copyright infringement of his article. In the notice, Bush claims he was “upset” to find out his article was plagiarized in the form of a discussion board post. Although the article has now been taken down, a snapshot taken by the Internet Archive shows September 14, 2015 as its supposed published date, backdated about three months prior to original post on Mumsnet. The article also claimed to have been posted from the city of South Bend, Indiana, of all places.

Douglas Bush’s fake article

Further investigation by participants on the Mumsnet forum showed the apparent home improvement website, gotohomestay.com, to be registered in Faisalabad, Pakistan by the name of Muhammad Ashraf.

Screenshot from the Mumsnet forums

Originally registered in April 2015, the website was then conveniently updated in March 2016, four months after the user’s original post on Mumsnet, and about a month before filing the DMCA notice. Additionally, the Internet Archive’s earliest snapshot of Douglas Bush’s “original work” was on May 23, 2016, long after his claim to have published it in September 2015.

Once presented with the evidence, you end up with a copyright claim for a review posted on a shoddy website, registered in Pakistan, by an untraceable person in Indiana named Douglas Bush, who for some apparent reason has had wo