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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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'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.
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.
Wow, excellent sleithing
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.
Intellectual property shakedowns are a big problem in the US -- both for patents and for copyrights. Good luck with this!
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.
Yup. Within my lifetime copyrights were for 28 years with a potential 47 year extension, this making them a maximum of 75 years.
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
Amazing work!!! Thank you for sharing!!
Good work! Always check.
https://hooshmand.net/dmca-copyright-infringement-scams/
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.
Thank you. Warnings are good. Like nerves. Make you jump back from danger.
Nice job! thanks for sharing
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".
Minor point: Stanford is not an Ivy League school.
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.
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
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.
(do not toe THE LINE OF)