Scammers Impersonated a Boston Law Firm Using AI-generated Faces
Nicole Palmer is a Columbia University graduate and a lawyer. According to her LinkedIn, she “specializes in the implementation and preservation of industrial design” and has “been effectively growing her profession for 30 years.”
The only issue is that she does not exist. And she assisted me in uncovering an internet fraud organization that was engaging in dubious actions such as extorting backlinks from bloggers and website owners.
I’ve spent the last week researching Arthur Davidson, the so-called “legal company” Nicole works for. What I saw was frightening, a monument to how technological advancements have made it simple for fraudsters to build up legitimate-looking companies to prey on their victims.
Hopefully, my discoveries may help others become more alert to similar frauds and protect themselves from them.
DMCA copyright infringement
Nicole contacted me with a “DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice” on April 13, introducing herself as a “Trademark Attorney of Arthur Davidson Legal Services” and claimed that a picture I used in TechTalks belonged to one of her clients.
“Our customer is fine with their photograph being utilized and published on the internet.” “However, correct image credit is required for previous or continuing usage,” she said.
I had seven days to add the picture credit on the “offending page” with a link to her client’s web site’s homepage, she said. “Otherwise, we will have to take legal action.”
The email concluded with DMCA Section 512(c) references and a professional signature. It appeared to be genuine. One oddity was a link to Imgur, an image-sharing website where anybody may contribute photographs without even creating a profile. (It’s very plausible that they grabbed the image from my website, submitted it to Imgur, and then claimed that their image appeared before mine.)
I normally keep note of the sources of the photos I use on my website and try not to utilize anyone else’s intellectual property without their permission. However, mistakes may occur, and I was more than willing to double-check my source and offer attribution to the client if I had erred.
The image, as I suspected, comes from Pexels, an online, royalty-free stock photo bank. I responded via email, including a link to the photograph as well as the Creative Commons license, which stipulates that no attribution is necessary. I inquired as to why she thought the photograph belonged to her customer.
Then I sat and waited.
A decent website with little depth
I followed up the next day, having not heard anything, to inquire whether she was abandoning the matter. At this point, I was beginning to believe that she was using intimidation to get me to include a connection to her client’s website.
Having high-authority websites link back to your web pages is one way to increase your site’s rank in search engine result pages. I’ve previously dealt with firms or individuals that attempted to insert links into my website. But doing so behind a legal guise was new to me.
I decided to take a deeper look at Arthur Davidson Legal Services’ website. Obviously, whoever created the website did an excellent job. First, the domain name (arthurdavidson.com) was well-chosen, implying that the website and company had been around for a long time, maybe from the early dot-com days.
According to his website, Arthur Davidson has been working since 2009, has been engaged in 420 cases, and has won 380 of them (approx. 90 percent success rate).
The website also includes a phone number in Boston and an address at 177 Huntington Ave, which contains numerous other legal companies.
The website has a blog with various entries, one of which helpfully states that copyright violation may result in a $10,000 punishment.
The about page features the biographies of 18 lawyers who attended Northeastern, Brown, Princeton, Harvard, and other prestigious colleges. However, unlike other professional websites, none of the lawyers have a LinkedIn profile listed on the website.
A parked domain
A closer investigation revealed many more red flags. First, I looked up the domain’s record on ICANN’s website (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). Apparently, Arthur Davidson had been working for 13 years but just decided to set up their domain in February 2022.
And then I looked up the website’s record on the Wayback Machine (archive.org). Apparently, the domain had been parked between 2005 and 2022.
(To be fair, there could be a logical explanation to this: The law firm might have used another domain name and recently purchased arthurdavidson.com from its previous owner.)
And then I Googled the firm’s name and looked up the news section. Logically, a firm that houses so many high-profile lawyers and claims to have won “multi-million dollar” lawsuits on behalf of its clients should have at least been mentioned in the news a few times.
No results.
GAN faces
Almost sure that this was a scam, I took a closer look at the “About Us” page. The photos of the lawyers seemed a bit out of place. I opened Nicole’s photo in full size on a separate tab.
What I saw was an image created by a generative adversarial network, a deep learning model that can be trained to create faces, art, or anything else.
Since its inception in 2014, GANs have gone a long way. They now create higher quality and more lifelike photos than previous versions. This Person Does Not Exist is a website that produces GAN faces. Some of them are frighteningly convincing.
However, GANs continue to produce artificial artifacts that are clearly detectable if you are knowledgeable about the technique. Earrings, shadings on the side of the face, hair and beard edges, wrinkles, brow borders, and the sides of eyeglasses are all easy areas to look for anomalies.
With overwhelming proof that this was a hoax, I decided to look into Arthur Davidson and submit my findings. I called the customer on whose behalf Nicole had contacted me on April 16 and asked them to clarify their relationship with Arthur Davidson. On April 18, a support representative responded that they had no affiliation with the law firm.
The Arthur Davidson website was soon taken down. (A version of it can still be seen on the Wayback Machine.)
Despite my suspicions that the client was in contact with the so-called legal company, I opted not to name them since I lacked definitive evidence.
Final thoughts
Arthur Davidson, in my opinion, was operated by a black hat SEO team. They’re down for the time being. But I’m sure they’ll reappear under a different name shortly. In retrospect, what they accomplished was not difficult. All they required was some online text for legal firms (simple to find and rephrase), a few template DCMA emails (free), a few GAN-generated faces (there’s a website for that), some web design experience, and some money to get a phone number and a domain. They were also utilizing social engineering to create a sense of urgency (seven-day deadline, legal action, etc.) in their victims, causing them to act without thinking.
I hope that these insights may assist other website owners in avoiding similar frauds. All of the resources I used to research Arthur Davidson are free and simple to use, and you can do it as well. Don’t freak out. You’ll be OK if you do your homework.
A word on anonymity: I have no problem with anybody wishing to conceal their identity online. There are lots of good reasons to do so, but one of them is to defraud others.
My advice to businesses considering hiring the services of such con artists is simple: don’t. The next individual may not be as understanding as I was. In my experience, there is no quick way to establish internet authority. People will offer you backlinks if you create outstanding material, build your network, and discover appropriate ways to spread it. Shady shortcuts may do more harm than good to your website and business.
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