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

Mostafa El Manzalawy - 2017 Lumen Summer Intern on August 7, 2017

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 work done by a building firm based in England. Factor in the website’s domain history, and the evidence that suggests the webpage did not exist before 2016, and nothing about this copyright claim seems to make much sense.

The very fact that the webpage containing Douglas Bush’s original work is no longer up should be enough to suspect that something nefarious is taking place. Once BuildTeam successfully accomplished their goal of removing the bad review, there was no sensible reason keep the fraudulent copy online as well.

The Guardian’s exposé on the BuildTeam scandal has done well to spread awareness about this particular method of misusing the DMCA, yet there is little known about the reputation agencies behind these schemes. We can however, look to the fake websites created by them as a tool to dig up additional fraudulent notices.

The proliferation of the stolen article scam has led to the creation of an unknown number of fake news websites set up with the sole intention of sending out illegal copyright notices.

Take the example of the “Lewisburg Tribune,” a seemingly legitimate sounding name of a local newspaper perhaps.

Internet Archive screenshot of the Lewisburg Tribune from March 13, 2016

While it’s not the cleanest looking website, it would appear at first glance to be your run-of-the-mill local news site, with the usual variety of articles about politics, celebrity gossip, and international news. That is, until you stumble upon the numerous DMCA notices sent to Google on behalf of the Lewisburg Tribune, all apparently attempting to take down a random assortment of copyrighted bad reviews.

One classic example from the Lumen Database shows a DMCA notice from “Lewisburg Tribune Networks,” submitted to Google Inc. about a copyright infringement claim regarding a terrible review of “Car Match USA,” a car dealership in Florida.

The complaint begins, “I am journalist and chief editor my work is copied from article,” and follows with the entire text of the article, perhaps not realizing it would be publicly available on the Lumen Database for anyone to see. A screenshot of the article captured by WebActivism reveals the scathing review of Car Match USA, copied directly from Ripoff Report, and made to look like a newspaper article. The page is backdated by about one week before the date of the original review on Ripoff Report.

Ripoff Report review disguised as an article on the Lewisburg Tribune

In another apparent slip up from Google’s removals team, we see that the Ripoff Report review was successfully delisted from Car Match USA’s search results. According to the company’s Transparency Report website, the Lewisburg Tribune’s URL removal request was granted accordingly.

Google’s Transparency Report for the Lewisburg Tribune’s DMCA notice

In another surprising incident, the Lewisburg Tribune was also used to censor an AdWeek article calling a Google Managing Director “unemployable,” and referring to his failed company as “sad” and “pathetic.”

According to AgencySpy, someone using “a fake name, a fake employer and a fake job description” filed a fraudulent DMCA claim to (successfully) remove a negative article written about Google’s Torrence Boone. While Boone denies any involvement with the DMCA notice, one can’t help but wonder why anyone that wasn’t him would attempt to take an article down on his behalf using this elaborate scheme.

The various layers of separation between the individual seeking to remove content, the fake identity filing the notice, and the reputation agency managing the process behind the scenes, makes it rather difficult to prove someone like Boone was intentionally engaging in copyright fraud. Even if you could link an individual to a particular reputation agency, they could simply plead ignorance in regards to the agency’s dubious practices.

The stolen article scam has in many cases proven successful in its mission to fraudulently censor content. The technique has led to an unknown number of other fake websites being set up with this exact purpose in mind. The Lewisburg Tribune, the Frankfort Herald, the Consumer Guardian, Global Girl Magazine, and Fox 18 News, are just some of the known fake news sites being used to fool Google into delisting undesirable search results. Its low risk, high reward potential also makes it extremely tempting for individuals and businesses to take advantage of. Despite the “good faith belief” clause being an essential part of the DMCA, no one has been penalized for this particular type of copyright scam to date.

Given the lack of available data on this topic, its apparent success rate, and potential for abuse, further research must be done to understand the extent of its use. Over the course of the past several weeks, I have accumulated a preliminary collection of notices, sourced from the Lumen Database, which appear to be using this scam as a takedown method. The data and results from my findings will be presented in an upcoming blog post.

Mostafa El Manzalawy is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College. He is currently pursuing his M.A. at NYU Gallatin, studying the tech industry and its effects on global wealth inequality. Mostafa is a tech enthusiast, spending his summer as an intern at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society doing research relating to data protection and privacy law for the Lumen database. In his free time, he can be found spending far too much time on his computer, listening to podcasts, and indulging his interests in Eastern philosophy and human behavior.