Wild story! Very cool. Yeah, I've been seeing discussion of various scams using AI-generated content. As soon as I saw your profile image of him, I started to suspect that it was AI-generated
Yeah, they have the classic StyleGAN look: the nose is exactly centered, the eyes are in exactly the same places in each image, and they have slightly odd ears, hair, or jewelry and a general fuzziness around the edges.
I think it's mostly the positioning. Part of what StyleGAN did to get such high quality faces was to carefully crop each photo to put the eyes and nose in the exact same point, which makes it a lot easier for the NN to learn and generate compared to normal photos. But it has the same drawback that a lot of NN generation does: in isolation, it looks fine; but when you see a few side by side, suddenly the eerie lack of diversity jumps out at you. Actual headshots vary a lot more than that. One or two might be bang-on like that, but 3 or 5 in a row? Generated.
The comma after the word "Comprising" was your first clue!
Yasher Koach on dropping into the rabbit hole of this scam. Your methods are also very helpful for people who want to "look before they leap" into paying for a scam.
As one half of a small publishing firm, we've seen this sort of scam several times. My husband (the other half of the firm) had this to say about this particular scam:
I note a few things about the scam:
1) The "Our Team" text is amazingly generic-sounding; to my ear (which I dare say is fairly sensitive to these things) it doesn't sound at all like something that was written by actual nature experts/enthusiasts. Such people do not sound like a half-awake Alex Gray.
2) The names of the three lawyers are also amazingly generic. Harris, Johnson, and Mongomery? For a firm in an eastern US city nowadays, the odds of three out of three lawyers being that non-ethnic would seem to be pretty low. It would also have been interesting if someone ran reverse-image searches for the three "lawyer" pics - how much do you want to be that they're bogus? (UPDATE: https://cl-service.info/attorneys/james-harris/ and https://cl-service.info/attorneys/emma-johnson/ both show up as generated pics on TinEye.com; https://cl-service.info/attorneys/simon-montgomery/ doesn't get a good match there, but I believe he does elsewhere. And the two other lawyers with pics, "Grace Jones" and "Henry Lee", also show up as generated pics on TinEye.) The lawyers' profiles also strike me as pretty bogus.
3) If you Google CitiLegal, the main thing that comes up is an apparently real firm in London. If you specify "CitiLegal Boston", you see some pages *about the scam*, plus two links to "cl-experts.biz" and "cl-service.info". How many real law firms do you think (A) use .biz or .info URLs, and (B) use two different URL names like those for the same firm? (Also, the vast majority of US law firms have names in the form of a list of founding-partner names; this was actually a legal requirement, which may have been loosened up in recent years. I remember when the NY firm "Coudert Brothers" was so unusual that it was considered a unique exception.)
So yeah - major scuzzbuckets out there. The only defense is (A) to keep one's own nose reasonably clean, and (B) not to panic too quickly when something like this appears out of the blue.
I used to be an IP (patents) agent. Copyright, as presently constituted, is theft. Owners of patents need to pay maintenance fees every several years (typically every four years) to keep their patents valid. Copyrights are free until they expire 90 years after the author's death. Copyrights should have maintenance fees just like patents. Anything whose copyright is not worth paying a maintenance fee for belongs in the public domain.
Great detective work. It's hard to believe they are really doing all that just to profit from backlinks and they wouldn't want to shake you down for money.
I get about 4 text or phone scams a day. It’s become easy to recognize them but with continuing AI sphostication I wonder how easy it will be to recognize these scams for what they are .
Great sleuthing and a wonderful public service.
Thanks !!
There are a number of “white hat” hackers who are fighting back. Here’s one.
While starting to read the blog.....My mind was getting the sensation that at the end this was some Charedi guy trying to scam Rabbi Slifkin.
Growing up in the charedi community, watching all the scams and shenanigan's going on. Suing Insurance companies at every chance, basically for nothing and getting a windfall etc. I was sure this was just another shakedown.
Years ago the charedim that came after the concentration camps, were much more honest then today. In business their word was a word. At that time when you saw a charedi you though he must be an Erlicher yid (honest Jew). So what happened?? Today it is just the opposite. Nebach!
Why can't we be better?
P.S. Sometimes when a frum guy came to meet in my business for something, when he left I told the girls' in the office, see that guy "when you shake hands with him you count your fingers".
I am charedi living in Monsey, but not willing to stick my head in the sand. I basically came to this conclusion after Covid when the entire population in America or Israel got together to try and stop these horrible deaths. Remember what the charedim did??
I rest my case. However, it hurts me to no end that we act like this?
All their other scams don't sound insane, only this ? To you it doesn't - what does that say about you, as opposed to the rest of us.
Do you want me to list all the other scams - Here is just a sampler to wet your appetite:
* Betting when old people will die, with Alter Kak.. life insurance policies
* Trip on a sidewalk or at a simcha, didn't get hurt, but sue anyway.
* Taking the "single mother with children's programs" claiming they can't exactly remember clearly who the father is...it is drawing a blank. Even though they are happily married, but never got the civil marriages.
I can go on all night, but it won't penetrate your closed off mind.
That is quite scary. Two thoughts come to mind. One is what a waste of creativity and ingenuity. There's someone very clever behind this scam. But I guess that's often the case with crime. Successful criminals are often quite ingenious. All the positive things they could be doing with that intellect, and this is what they come up with?
Second, I always think it's fascinating to conder the ability of people to rationalize away this kind of behavior. Do the people behind this scam think of themselves as evildoers? Probably not. They probably rationalize that no one is really harmed, or that everyone else is also doing whatever they can to get an edge, or that if you're dumb enough to fall for it, you deserve what you get, or any of a number of other rationalizations. People almost never see themselves as the bad guy. Just an observation.
I'm trying to figure out why this post is relevant to this blog. Sure, its a great story, and connected to your website - but honestly now, how is this informative about topics relevant to Rationalist Judaism?
I've come to the conclusion that you see a Jewish Rationalist hero as also a Scam-buster. First and foremost, the "scam" of hareidi Judaism. And somewhere down the line, also the scams like in this article.
haha. Does that ease the pressure from taking me seriously?
Natan - I'm a BT for 40 years, who's been through the gamut of yiddishkeit. Youth work with Reform & Conservative, time on a secular kibbutz, studied at JTS... and UC Berkeley and Bar-Ilan. Eventually, yes, I've studied in hareidi yeshivas and today I live in a rather hareidi community. Does that make me a hareidi troll?? I'm just a serious thinker about many issues plaguing our nation, like you. Must you dismiss my view because I've become much more hareidi friendly than you???
Com'on. You haven't written this blog for an echo chamber, have you?
What I write are expressions of MY thinking, based on my entire life of critically exploring a wide gamut of Jewish life. I do not toe any political or ideological talking points. A "rather hareidi community" means that the majority appear to be firmly within the hareidi voting camp, but there are plenty of independent thinkers among them, including me.
Sure, there is an animal element within us all. But also a divine soul, which needs to tame it. Judaism 101. Avraham Avinu was distinguished by his independent thinking. The Maor V'Shemesh explains that this was precisely his issue when he questioned H' about His promise for progeny. He didn't want descendants who'd think just like him! (based on Rashy, who says his complaint about Damasek Eliezer being his apparent heir was because he was דולה ומשקה בתורת רבו, meaning that he was giving over his master's teachings EXACTLY as the original. BUT AVRAHAM COULDN'T BELIEVE THE WORLD NEEDED ANOTHER AVRAHAM! His spiritual heir must be able to bring something new to the world).
No question of rights, here. Just trying to clarify if this blog has a clear intellectual agenda, or is it purely personal.
I was critical of this posting bc it seemed like it was hijacking the blog, which was initially dedicated to a scientific approach to Jewish topics. He gained a certain notoriety by courageously reporting where modern science contradicts Chazal, and then slowly but surely turned his platform into a Hareidi-bashing fest, and of late was shifting into personal ramblings about general politics, family woes, and a net scam.
If you want to applaud whatever he throws at you, בבקשה. But if that's dominating, I'm gone. But I'd prefer to believe he has more character than that, and if he'd stick to his rationalism, we all might learn some good things.
Are you serious? Rabbi Slifkin writes occasionally on this blog about animals (reference his encyclopedia). The subject of the "scam" was a picture of a laopard that was supposedly on his web site and book.
I get it. But why do we need to hear the whole drama of the scam? Nothing to do with rational Judaism and zoology, per se`. I know, I know - he has plenty of fans who enjoy his take-downs of all who cross his path. And it's legit to do a Rabbi Dr. Slifkin fan club, shlit"a. But its labelled Rationalist Judaism, and he claims to be promoting this school of thought. I'd just like him to humble himself a bit more and really dig into that subject, and respond to those who challenge his opinions in the spirit of elu v'elu.
As for the name of the site, I started it many years ago with more restricted focus. It's too difficult to change the name now. But I did change the subtitle.
Wild story! Very cool. Yeah, I've been seeing discussion of various scams using AI-generated content. As soon as I saw your profile image of him, I started to suspect that it was AI-generated
Yeah, they have the classic StyleGAN look: the nose is exactly centered, the eyes are in exactly the same places in each image, and they have slightly odd ears, hair, or jewelry and a general fuzziness around the edges.
Great calls, very interesting. I've actually been wondering what it is recently that makes them look not fully realistic.
And also, feels like worlds colliding, was just reading a piece of Dwarkesh quoting you!
I think it's mostly the positioning. Part of what StyleGAN did to get such high quality faces was to carefully crop each photo to put the eyes and nose in the exact same point, which makes it a lot easier for the NN to learn and generate compared to normal photos. But it has the same drawback that a lot of NN generation does: in isolation, it looks fine; but when you see a few side by side, suddenly the eerie lack of diversity jumps out at you. Actual headshots vary a lot more than that. One or two might be bang-on like that, but 3 or 5 in a row? Generated.
Fascinating. I assumed that it's simply due to the fact that it's highly 'idealized'
The comma after the word "Comprising" was your first clue!
Yasher Koach on dropping into the rabbit hole of this scam. Your methods are also very helpful for people who want to "look before they leap" into paying for a scam.
As one half of a small publishing firm, we've seen this sort of scam several times. My husband (the other half of the firm) had this to say about this particular scam:
I note a few things about the scam:
1) The "Our Team" text is amazingly generic-sounding; to my ear (which I dare say is fairly sensitive to these things) it doesn't sound at all like something that was written by actual nature experts/enthusiasts. Such people do not sound like a half-awake Alex Gray.
2) The names of the three lawyers are also amazingly generic. Harris, Johnson, and Mongomery? For a firm in an eastern US city nowadays, the odds of three out of three lawyers being that non-ethnic would seem to be pretty low. It would also have been interesting if someone ran reverse-image searches for the three "lawyer" pics - how much do you want to be that they're bogus? (UPDATE: https://cl-service.info/attorneys/james-harris/ and https://cl-service.info/attorneys/emma-johnson/ both show up as generated pics on TinEye.com; https://cl-service.info/attorneys/simon-montgomery/ doesn't get a good match there, but I believe he does elsewhere. And the two other lawyers with pics, "Grace Jones" and "Henry Lee", also show up as generated pics on TinEye.) The lawyers' profiles also strike me as pretty bogus.
3) If you Google CitiLegal, the main thing that comes up is an apparently real firm in London. If you specify "CitiLegal Boston", you see some pages *about the scam*, plus two links to "cl-experts.biz" and "cl-service.info". How many real law firms do you think (A) use .biz or .info URLs, and (B) use two different URL names like those for the same firm? (Also, the vast majority of US law firms have names in the form of a list of founding-partner names; this was actually a legal requirement, which may have been loosened up in recent years. I remember when the NY firm "Coudert Brothers" was so unusual that it was considered a unique exception.)
So yeah - major scuzzbuckets out there. The only defense is (A) to keep one's own nose reasonably clean, and (B) not to panic too quickly when something like this appears out of the blue.
Yes, I also noticed how generic the names were
Please note while Stanford University is highly regarded as a major university, it is not in the Ivy League.
I used to be an IP (patents) agent. Copyright, as presently constituted, is theft. Owners of patents need to pay maintenance fees every several years (typically every four years) to keep their patents valid. Copyrights are free until they expire 90 years after the author's death. Copyrights should have maintenance fees just like patents. Anything whose copyright is not worth paying a maintenance fee for belongs in the public domain.
It should be *at* death of the author at best, but Disney is very powerful.
And the Beatles.
Maybe now that Mickey Mouse is finally in the public domain, Disney will ease up and things will go back to normal.
(Of course, with the internet, it's easy to access stuff still copyrighted in the US via other countries.)
This
Wow, excellent sleithing
Good work! Always check.
https://hooshmand.net/dmca-copyright-infringement-scams/
Amazing work!!! Thank you for sharing!!
Great detective work. It's hard to believe they are really doing all that just to profit from backlinks and they wouldn't want to shake you down for money.
I get about 4 text or phone scams a day. It’s become easy to recognize them but with continuing AI sphostication I wonder how easy it will be to recognize these scams for what they are .
Great sleuthing and a wonderful public service.
Thanks !!
There are a number of “white hat” hackers who are fighting back. Here’s one.
https://youtu.be/RfgqMVheROA?si=p3KCQz6zR8RE-3Gh
OMG!! What a story. Good sleuthing and I really appreciate the detail you went into describing your approach to deducing the truth.
While starting to read the blog.....My mind was getting the sensation that at the end this was some Charedi guy trying to scam Rabbi Slifkin.
Growing up in the charedi community, watching all the scams and shenanigan's going on. Suing Insurance companies at every chance, basically for nothing and getting a windfall etc. I was sure this was just another shakedown.
Years ago the charedim that came after the concentration camps, were much more honest then today. In business their word was a word. At that time when you saw a charedi you though he must be an Erlicher yid (honest Jew). So what happened?? Today it is just the opposite. Nebach!
Why can't we be better?
P.S. Sometimes when a frum guy came to meet in my business for something, when he left I told the girls' in the office, see that guy "when you shake hands with him you count your fingers".
You are a deranged lunatic.
Paranoia is in the public domain
You have Chareidi hate mental illness that even Kanye doesn't have.
"Why can't we be better"?
That's why medication was created.
I understand the truth hurts.
I am charedi living in Monsey, but not willing to stick my head in the sand. I basically came to this conclusion after Covid when the entire population in America or Israel got together to try and stop these horrible deaths. Remember what the charedim did??
I rest my case. However, it hurts me to no end that we act like this?
The fact that you thought Chareidim were scamming Natan Slifkin through a dmca takedown sounds insane
M
All their other scams don't sound insane, only this ? To you it doesn't - what does that say about you, as opposed to the rest of us.
Do you want me to list all the other scams - Here is just a sampler to wet your appetite:
* Betting when old people will die, with Alter Kak.. life insurance policies
* Trip on a sidewalk or at a simcha, didn't get hurt, but sue anyway.
* Taking the "single mother with children's programs" claiming they can't exactly remember clearly who the father is...it is drawing a blank. Even though they are happily married, but never got the civil marriages.
I can go on all night, but it won't penetrate your closed off mind.
That is quite scary. Two thoughts come to mind. One is what a waste of creativity and ingenuity. There's someone very clever behind this scam. But I guess that's often the case with crime. Successful criminals are often quite ingenious. All the positive things they could be doing with that intellect, and this is what they come up with?
Second, I always think it's fascinating to conder the ability of people to rationalize away this kind of behavior. Do the people behind this scam think of themselves as evildoers? Probably not. They probably rationalize that no one is really harmed, or that everyone else is also doing whatever they can to get an edge, or that if you're dumb enough to fall for it, you deserve what you get, or any of a number of other rationalizations. People almost never see themselves as the bad guy. Just an observation.
I'm trying to figure out why this post is relevant to this blog. Sure, its a great story, and connected to your website - but honestly now, how is this informative about topics relevant to Rationalist Judaism?
I've come to the conclusion that you see a Jewish Rationalist hero as also a Scam-buster. First and foremost, the "scam" of hareidi Judaism. And somewhere down the line, also the scams like in this article.
Am I onto something?
I've come to the conclusion that you're a chareidi troll.
I was tempted to write a parody comment along the lines of Bar-Chaiim׳s comment as joke but this “serious” attempt is even funnier.
haha. Does that ease the pressure from taking me seriously?
Natan - I'm a BT for 40 years, who's been through the gamut of yiddishkeit. Youth work with Reform & Conservative, time on a secular kibbutz, studied at JTS... and UC Berkeley and Bar-Ilan. Eventually, yes, I've studied in hareidi yeshivas and today I live in a rather hareidi community. Does that make me a hareidi troll?? I'm just a serious thinker about many issues plaguing our nation, like you. Must you dismiss my view because I've become much more hareidi friendly than you???
Com'on. You haven't written this blog for an echo chamber, have you?
It's more what you write than what you are.
I do wonder what makes something "rather" charedi.
What I write are expressions of MY thinking, based on my entire life of critically exploring a wide gamut of Jewish life. I do not toe any political or ideological talking points. A "rather hareidi community" means that the majority appear to be firmly within the hareidi voting camp, but there are plenty of independent thinkers among them, including me.
We all like to think we are independent thinkers.
We are, of course, herd animals.
Sure, there is an animal element within us all. But also a divine soul, which needs to tame it. Judaism 101. Avraham Avinu was distinguished by his independent thinking. The Maor V'Shemesh explains that this was precisely his issue when he questioned H' about His promise for progeny. He didn't want descendants who'd think just like him! (based on Rashy, who says his complaint about Damasek Eliezer being his apparent heir was because he was דולה ומשקה בתורת רבו, meaning that he was giving over his master's teachings EXACTLY as the original. BUT AVRAHAM COULDN'T BELIEVE THE WORLD NEEDED ANOTHER AVRAHAM! His spiritual heir must be able to bring something new to the world).
it's his blog, he can write whatever he wants. What gives you the right to to express your thinking while trying to limit his??
No question of rights, here. Just trying to clarify if this blog has a clear intellectual agenda, or is it purely personal.
I was critical of this posting bc it seemed like it was hijacking the blog, which was initially dedicated to a scientific approach to Jewish topics. He gained a certain notoriety by courageously reporting where modern science contradicts Chazal, and then slowly but surely turned his platform into a Hareidi-bashing fest, and of late was shifting into personal ramblings about general politics, family woes, and a net scam.
If you want to applaud whatever he throws at you, בבקשה. But if that's dominating, I'm gone. But I'd prefer to believe he has more character than that, and if he'd stick to his rationalism, we all might learn some good things.
(do not toe THE LINE OF)
Are you serious? Rabbi Slifkin writes occasionally on this blog about animals (reference his encyclopedia). The subject of the "scam" was a picture of a laopard that was supposedly on his web site and book.
I get it. But why do we need to hear the whole drama of the scam? Nothing to do with rational Judaism and zoology, per se`. I know, I know - he has plenty of fans who enjoy his take-downs of all who cross his path. And it's legit to do a Rabbi Dr. Slifkin fan club, shlit"a. But its labelled Rationalist Judaism, and he claims to be promoting this school of thought. I'd just like him to humble himself a bit more and really dig into that subject, and respond to those who challenge his opinions in the spirit of elu v'elu.
I respond to those who challenge my opinions.
As for the name of the site, I started it many years ago with more restricted focus. It's too difficult to change the name now. But I did change the subtitle.
So you're saying you don't really see this blog as focused on promoting Rationalist Judaism? It's more about sharing your thinking, on whatever topic?
nobody is forcing you to hear it. Do you need help finding the door?
Great reporting. I was involved in a similar fake lawyer/website traffic driver scam a couple of years ago.
But as you can tell from my name, I know sharks! ( Some one will figure it out!)
Martin Brody
You're gonna need a bigger boat.
Why don't you chum some of this?
They have no sole.
Also, their phone number is listed as having a 555 area code.