Monthly Archives: October 2024

Webmasters beware: Fake DMCA Scam

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NOTE: This blog post was updated on January 25, 2025. Update at end.

If you own a website that uses stock images or even images you’ve taken yourself, beware a scam floating around that tries to trick you into putting links to another site on your pages.

I recently received a phony “DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice” run by a scammer attempting to get backlinks to a site called KnowYourSins, a sex site run by two people named Samuel Davis (@Samueld_KYS on Twitter) and Olivia Moore (@Olivia_kys on Twitter).

The letter claims to come from a law firm called “Commonwealth Legal Services” in Phoenix, Arizona. Here’s a screenshot:

So, the first thing to know about this email is it’s very unusual for a DMCA complaint, which is almost always a takedown request, not a request for a backlink.

The second thing to notice is there’s a standard format for DMCA takedowns, and they must, by law, include:

  • Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and e-mail address.
  • A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized.
  • A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder.

The image itself comes from Unsplash, specifically this one, and it was taken by Eric Lucatero, who has no connection with KnowYourSins dot com.

Huh.

Commonwealth Legal Services

I looked at the website of the supposed “law firm” that sent it, justicesolutionshub.info. Now, the fact that it uses a .info top-level domain immediately set off warning bells in my head as well.

“Zoe Baker” signs this email “Trademark Attorney,” yet the page on justicesolutionshub.info lists “her” as a “business legal consultant.”

Huh.

On top of that, notice anything funny about all these headshots? Look closely.

Yup, they’re all generated by AI—specifically, they all come from This Person Does Not Exist.

How can you tell?

AI deepfake faces generated by This Person Does Not Exist always have eyes in exactly the same place exactly the same size and exactly the same distance apart. It’s a limitation of the adversarial GAN software that creates the fake faces.

You can see it if you stack the faces on top of each other and make them translucent in Photoshop.

I looked up “Commonwealth Legal Services” on Google. It turns out there are a bunch of different websites at different URLs all using the same exact web design with the same copy and the same pictures: justicesolutionshub.info, cwsolutions.biz, elitejusticeadvisors.biz (currently offline), and more.

The front page of justicesolutionshub.info shows a photo of a building. The office building is a stock photo rendering that you can put any logo in front of.

This is an Adobe Photos stock photo rendering created by digital artist “Esin.” A surprising number of phony fly-by-night bogus “companies” use this stock image as their corporate headquarters on their About or Contact pages.

Things really take a turn for the surreal if you put the address of “Commonwealth Legal Services,” 3909 N. 16th Street, Fourth Floor, Phoenix, AZ 85016 into Google Street View. This one weird trick produced results you aren’t going to believe:

Note the conspicuous absence of a fourth floor. As of the time of writing this, the building is currently listed for sale.

Okay, so we have a fake DMCA takedown request from a phony law office attempting to blackmail me into putting a backlink to Know Your Sins from my site.

Know Your Sins

So, what is Know Your Sins?

It’s a more or less generic BDSM information site with precious little in the way of in-depth information, using largely AI-generated content and stock photos.

I can see a couple of possibilities:

  1. Know Your Sins is scamming in a desperate bid to attract backlinks and improve their search engine ranking.
  2. Know Your Sins is a victim; they hired a dodgy “we can boost your search engine ranking” scammer, not knowing that he was engaging in fraud.

I emailed the contact address at Know Your Sins, hello (at) knowyoursins (dot) com, to try to get some insight. So far, as of the time of writing this, I have not received a reply. I will update this blog post if they get back in touch with me.

I’ve also been in touch with several webmasters who have received identical DMCA complaints, at least one of whom was accused of pirating a photo he took, all with demands to link back to Know Your Sins.

The Know Your Sins domain registration is hidden by Privacy protect. I’ve filed a formal complaint with them, since they claim they’ll rescind the privacy protection on sites that engage in spamming or fraud. (I urge anyone who’s received one of these scam emails to do the same using the “report abuse” form here.) If they reply, I’ll post the results.

Isn’t there a penalty for false DMCA takedown requests?

No. Perhaps surprisingly, there isn’t.

There are penalties for impersonating a lawyer, and for fraud. The emails are definitely fraud, and I do not for even half a second believe the person sending them is a lawyer, so there may be avenues of legal action there. I suspect, given that others are reporting these emails but they don’t always demand a link to Know Your Sins (some of them demand links to other sites), that what’s most likely happening is a scammer is selling his services to desperate website owners who want more Google linkbacks but don’t care too much if they’re totally on the up and up.

The lesson here

Genuine DMCA takedown requests must follow a certain specific legal format (including a statement that under penalty of perjury, the person sending the request has a good-faith belief that the claimed infringement is genuine), and don’t ask for linkbacks.

If you get a “DMCA warning” or “DMCA takedown” that asks you to link to another site, you’re being scammed.

If you’ve received one of these fake takedown requests, I’d love to hear from you! I’m in the process of trying to strip the Privacy Protection from the knowyoursins domain registration, and the more examples I have, the better. Please feel free to email me at franklin (at) franklinveaux (dot) com.

UPDATE JANUARY 25, 2025

A lot of people have sent me copies of similar fake DMCA emails demanding linkbacks to knowyoursins dot com. The site is registered at GoDaddy. This morning, I had a long and interesting conversation with a member of the GoDaddy abuse team, who has told me that GoDaddy is opening an investigation into knowyoursins dot com for fraudulent DMCA takedowns and fraudulent backlink farming.

Have you received a “DMCA takedown” demanding a link to knowyoursins dot com? GoDaddy’s abuse team would like to hear from you.

Please visit the GoDaddy abuse reporting form at

https://supportcenter.godaddy.com/abusereport

Create a new report, choose the “Phishing” option, and in the details section, put a copy of the fraudulent email you received, with a brief explanation that you are reporting the site for fraudulent DMCA takedowns and fraudulent backlink farming.

And, of course, I’d love to see copies of the fraudulent emails you’ve received.

The Pod

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It all started when I accidentally clicked on Facebook Marketplace.

I was trying to click on my notifications. On the iOS app, the Marketplace button is next to the Notifications button, and, well…

As God is my witness, I do not know why Facebook Marketplace thought I would be interested in a gigantic human-sized pod. I mean, it was absolutely 100% right, but how did it know?

And so it came to pass that I, after much back and forth with the seller (who owns a clinic that was moving, and didn’t have space for it any more) and some absolutely heroic efforts from my friend Stan to move the damn thing, came into possession of a Bod Pod, a medical scanner originally, I gather, designed to calculate body mass.

Of course, when I saw that listing on Facebook on that fateful day, my mind immediately, as it is wont to do, went to images of the alien eggs from the Alien movies.

What if, thought I, I could cover this Bod Pod in silicone, making an alien egg large enough for a person? And what if, I continued as my brain inevitably rode this train to the last station, I could make a whole bunch of gigantic silicone tentacles—say, just for the sake of argument, nine and a hald feet long or so—that might explode from the pod, dripping with slime, trying to drag a Helpless Victim™ into the egg-thing? And what if, I continued on, having at this point reached the last station, crashed through the wall, and sailed on into the Beyond Space where anything is possible, I did a photo shoot, in which this poor Helpless Victim™ was molested by tentacles from this giant alien pod?

Now, of course, getting from pod to giant alien egg with tentacles is a Project, one I have only just barely embarked upon.

The first step to a pod with tentacles is, of course, the pod. The second step is the tentacles, and so it was, Gentle Reader, that I set about designing a Giant Tentacle in a 3D modeling program.

From this Giant Tentacle, I created a mold that could be printed in 15-inch segments, which is the maximum print size on my 3D printer, with an overall length of over 9 feet.

Of course, I didn’t really quite imagine how long a 9-foot mold is, so it turned out that once the mold was complete—something that took days of printing—I didn’t have enough space for it without rearranging furniture.

Seriously, nine-feet-plus of mold is more mold than you think it is.

It’s also a lot harder to cast silicone in an open-face mold this size than I expected it to be. Like, a lot harder. In this much space, silicone doesn’t behave the way you’d expect it to. It’s kind of like lava—it doesn’t flow to fill the entire mold. (It doesn’t help that my vacuum chamber also isn’t big enough to degas this much silicone all at once, either.)

So I had to make the pour in a bunch of steps, which created all sorts of weird problems. I’d planned to have the suckers lighter than the rest, with bands of color through the tentacles. That…didn’t work. The coloring pigment actually migrated up through the silicone, something it doesn’t do in a smaller mold.

The mold is just a liiiiitle teensy bit more than half the diameter of the tentacle, so it just barely starts to pinch inward at the top. This is so that I could cast half the tentacle, remove it from the mold, fill it with silicone again, then put the half I’d already cast on top, and that slight bit of pinch would grab the bit I’d already cast.

The result worked out pretty well, though it uses a lot of silicone—I made two tentacles, and together they’re about $100 worth of body-safe platinum-cure silicone alone, not including the cost of printing the mold.

When I flew to Springfield to see my Talespinner, I brought the tentacles (of course), which caused some degree of consternation at TSA (of course). We trialled the tentacles as a means of violation of Helpless Victims™, at which they excelled, but we (by which I mean she and her other lover, as I looked on) also gave them a try as an impact toy, at which they also excelled.

In fact, this may be the thuddiest impact toy ever conceived by man, more thuddy even than the Dread Koosh Flogger, a flogger made (as the name suggests) from Koosh balls.

I’m considering making an impact tentacle toy that’s basically a short length of this tentacle with a handle on the end.

When I returned from Springfield, armed with more information to allow the Great Tentacle Pod Project to move forward, I unpacked my suitcase and tossed the tentacles over the pod, lacking a better place to put them (and nine-foot tentacles are both heavier and take up more storage space than you may realize).

It struck me yesterday that visitors to my home, upon walking into my living room and seeing this, might be subject to some discomfiture.

Project Ladybug

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Imagine the scene: It’s late at night. A Beautiful Young Woman has just had a fight with her Wretched Boyfriend at a nightclub, and is walking home through the bad part of town, an industrial park fallen on hard times, now the home of shuttered businesses and derelict warehouses.

A meteor streaks across the sky, growing larger and larger, until it crashes through the roof of an abandoned warehouse, now crumbling into ruin. Curious, the Beautiful Young Woman investigates, but soon finds herself in trouble when the alien drones spring from the dark recesses of the abandoned warehouse and drag her before the Alien Queen, which has hauled itself from the still-smoking spacecraft. The Alien Queen sprouts a mass of wet, slimy tentacles that violate the helpless Beautiful Young Woman in ways far too shocking to describe in this blog entry, lest you, Gentle Reader, pass out from the vapors, giving her ecstasy beyond anything she has ever known before until at last, delirious, she is overcome and loses her senses.

She wakes some time later, driven by a gnawing hunger more powerful than anything she’s ever known before, an insatiable sexual need that drives her from the warehouse in search of prey. For you see, she is now host to an Alien Parasite, a creature that fills her with need, driving her to mate with all who cross her path, spreading the alien seed as she does. The parasite lives deep within her ladybits, granting unspeakable ecstasy to all with whom she copulates but denying her pleasure herself, as she roves the town in a frenzy of frantic, unnatural lust.

From this fantasy, spun by my Talespinner and me in a late-night sexting session, came our newest foray into weird sex toys from a realm beyond imagination: Project Ladybug.

“What if,” thought I, “I could actually make an alien that lived within her ladybits?” Picture something like a soft silicone fleshlight masturbator, designed to be worn vaginally, with a sinister alien opening and tentacles that wrap around her legs, holding it in place. It would grant great pleasure to those who have sex with the Beautiful Young Woman™ so afflicted, whilst denying her of any pleasure herself, so as to keep the fires of her lust unslaked.

This is Project Ladybug, and it comes after the first successful test of the nine-foot tentacle project.

So it was that when I was in Springfield two weeks ago visiting my Talespinner that we set about turning Project Ladybug into reality.

The idea was a sex toy exactly custom-fit to her internal anatomy, that would keep her nicely filled when the Alien Parasite was within her, so the first step was making a cast of her inside bits.

I thought this would be fairly easy. Slip in a female condom, fill her with dental alginate to the point she was properly full, wait for it to set, then remove it, make a 3D scan of it, and use that as the basis for the stroker. 3D print a model of the stroker, cast it in super-soft silicone…what could be simpler, right?

Ah, if only.

I ordered some alginate and, because alginate soon crumbles and is not very durable, some casting material to make a mold of the alginate, so that if it didn’t survive the trip home, I could cast her internal bits in silicone and 3D scan that.

Armed with casting materials and a female condom, we set about the first bit, which quickly proved more difficult than we anticipated.

You’d think it would be easy. Lie your model on her back, slip in the female condom, fill with alginate, wait a couple minutes, and Bob’s your uncle.

In practice, the first two efforts met with failure, because the alginate (a) sets way too fast (even if you get medium-set material) and (b) comes gushing back out, and (c) the entrance to the typical hoo-ha is soft and pliable enough that the casting won’t stay centered.

However, my Talespinner came up with the idea of using a canning funnel to…um, provide structural stability at the vaginal entrance, and I used cold water to mix the third batch of alginate to slow setting…

…which meant she had time to play on her phone whilst it set…

…et voilà!

At this point, we had a (quite fragile) alginate representation of her internal anatomy. It was difficult and expensive enough to make, and the flight home fraught enough (I’d broken my suitcase on a previous trip to a convention, and so had flown out to see her with only a duffel bag), that I was paranoid, so I used a 3D scan program on my phone to make a quick, dirty 3D scan of the cast in case it was damaged on the trip home.

I shan’t bore you with the details of exactly what a PITA that turned out to be, except to say that it needed a place with (a) bright light that (b) I could move around in three dimensions (c) with a background that wouldn’t confuse the phone, so I ended up hanging her ladycast by a string from the ceiling fan in the middle of the living room with a sheet wrapped around, which is just as ridiculous and surreal as it sounds.

Anyway, emergency backup 3D scan made, it was time to make a cast, in the event the alginate didn’t survive the trip home.

I cast it right up to the midline, let the material set, sprayed it with mold release agent, then did a second pour to cast it full.

That created an entirely new problem.

Enter the TSA

I flew back to Portland with the cast, and a nine-foot-long silicone tentacle, and a four-foot-long silicone tentacle, in my carry-on luggage.

These things created no small measure of consternation at security.

The finished cast looked like this:

The X-ray looked…bizarre. (I really, really wish TSA would let me take pictures of the X-ray screens when I travel, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.)

They pulled my bag, as you would expect. They asked me many questions about the solid lump of heavy cement in my bag, as you’d expect. They swabbed it for explosives, as you’d expect.

Then they shut down the security checkpoint and called every single TSA agent over to examine the block of cement, which I did not expect.

They swabbed it for explosives again, using a different technique, one I didn’t even know they had.

They called a supervisor.

The supervisor comes over, glances at the X-ray, says “oh, I know what that is,” and waves me through.

As God is my witness, I really, really want to know what he thought it was. Because I can think of only two possibilities:

  1. He had no idea what it was, but he thought he did, in which case I will confess I am super curious about what he believed it was; or
  2. He knew exactly what it was, in which case he seems the sort of person I should get to know.

Upon arriving home, I faced yet another problem:

The mold release agent I put between the layers of the cast didn’t work.

Now I have a solid lump of cement with Kitty’s kitty trapped within, and freeing it is proving a nightmare. Half an hour of hard work with a hacksaw succeeded only in getting this far:

It may yet come to pass that I reconstruct Kitty’s kitty in a 3D program from the phone-generated scan and the photos I took. (I took a ton of photos, with a measuring tape for scale.)

In any event, Project Ladybug is proceeding apace, and at some point in the not to distant future I plan to have a monstrous alien parasite custom-fit to my Talespinner’s ladybits (for you see, the name Ladybug came from an autocorrect fail of “ladybits”) that will attach itself to her, driving her to a frenzy of unspeakable, insatiable alien lust.

Because if you’re going to make freaky sex toys, I think it’s time to move beyond “fantasy penises of supernatural creatures.”