Data from the Lumen Database Highlights How Companies Use Fake Websites and Backdated Articles to Censor Google’s Search Results

Over the course of the summer, I have been researching notices pertaining to the little-known “stolen article” copyright scam that has been used to successfully remove an unknown number of unwanted URLs from the Google’s search results. The scam is relatively easy to execute, and has grown in popularity since 2013. Below, I discuss the nature of this content removal tactic, and present my findings from a preliminary dataset of 42 DMCA notices targeting a total of 52 allegedly infringing URLs.

INTRODUCTION

Businesses have become increasingly creative in their attempts to misuse the DMCA to remove negative reviews from the Internet. They have gone to great lengths to falsely claim copyright infringement with the intent of taking down content from Google’s search results and review sites.

One such tactic is the “stolen article” scam, which uses fake websites and backdated articles to remove content online. As described in a previous blog post, the scam typically plays 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.

METHOD

The goal of this research project was to gather a varied sample of notices from the Lumen Database, which appeared to be using the stolen article scam to silence negative publicity online. Each notice was thoroughly investigated to ensure it was sufficiently “suspicious” to include in the dataset. The search for notices was not limited by date of submission, as this has shown to be a fairly new phenomenon in the world of digital copyright fraud.

SOURCES

Lumen Database

In order to find notices that bear a close resemblance to those using the stolen article scam, I searched for several combinations of the following words directly into the Lumen Database: “copied,” “review,” “stole,” “stolen,” “text,” “article,” “copyright,” “journalist,” in addition to the names of some well-known review sites like “Ripoff Report,” “Yelp,” and “TripAdvisor.” Results were then filtered by topic to only show DMCA notices.

Google Transparency Report

Once I had gathered the names of some of the “journalists” or “news sites” submitting DMCA takedowns to Google, I could then search Google’s Transparency Report for more of them. Under the section for “content removals due to copyright,” I was able to search for additional DMCA takedown notices submitted on behalf of the fraudulent websites.

News Articles

Although there is little written about this particular scam, I was able to find some examples in the press which served as a good starting point. Some notable mentions involve a UK home renovation company, a prominent Google executive, and an online gadget retailer, all allegedly attempting to remove negative reviews or articles by creating and backdating fake news articles online. WebActivism, a crowdfunded website dedicated to exposing online scams, was also tremendously helpful in my search for fake DMCAs.

INVESTIGATIVE TOOLS

DomainTools

DomainTools is an incredibly useful resource which allows you to look up historical WHOIS data of a particular domain.

For instance, let us examine a notice filed by “Fox18 News Network LLC” as a model for researching fake DMCAs. Fox18 News Network LLC sent