(graphic thuds)
- Scam e-mails come in all shapes and sizes,
and today I wanna walk you through one of the scam e-mails
that I got just last week,
how I found out it was a scam, and what I did about it.
(logo bleeps)
Hi, my name's Josh.
Hopefully this kinda walkthrough will be helpful for you.
I get these kind of e-mails all the time,
and believe it or not you probably do too,
and you don't realize it.
Some of these e-mails
get automatically put in the spam folder,
but some of them make it through,
and this is one of those that made it through,
and I wanna show you exactly what happened.
Okay, so a couple of weeks ago I got this e-mail
from a woman named Jillian at Nody Law,
and it said, basically that, "It's come to the attention
"of our client that this website, which you own,
"used his images without approval
"and without any proper credit to the copyright owner."
Now, I take this kind of e-mail seriously,
because I have as a blogger
with over 10 years of blogging experience,
I have in the past used images inadvertently
without the consent of the proper copyright owner,
and I've been attacked by their lawyers.
And so, this is a very serious thing,
and I didn't wanna just throw it away
or dismiss it as nothing,
and she tried her best to make it sound very serious.
Charges as high as one £150,000.
You have until April 30th to respond
or else we're gonna have to take legal recourse.
All of these things are meant to try to scare somebody
who's receiving this e-mail.
Now, before I went and responded to her
I did a little research in the background.
I wanted to find out if, first of all,
I didn't wanna click any links in the e-mail,
she didn't have any but I didn't wanna click any anyway,
and I didn't wanna go straight to the website
because it could have malware.
So the first thing I did,
and I'll have links to all of these things,
these resources that I'm using in the description below,
but I first went to Google Safe Browsing site status.
Essentially what it does,
is it lets me know if a website that is being crawled,
or that I'm trying to access,
has any malware or anything like that.
So, I'm going to search for nodylaw.com,
and tell Google is this safe to go to.
They said, "Yes."
There's no unsafe content found, good.
So then I went to the website,
which if you're trying to go to it now
you're gonna find that it's actually non-existent,
so please don't type this URL into your address bar,
I'm sure that they still own it,
and they could forward you anywhere they wanted to.
But the Nody Law Firm website looks half way legitimate.
They've changed it since I first accessed it,
and it looks better than it once did.
But it's still, it's just a one-page website,
which for a law firm is not very common in my opinion.
So that was the first red flag, just a one-page website.
I could try to call this phone number,
but instead what I did,
is I made WHOIS lookup of the domain.
So I went in and looked up
who exactly owns the nodylaw domain,
and what you're gonna find is usually there's
not a lot of information that they'll give you, okay?
They're gonna hide behind some privacy on here.
But one thing I did find interesting
is that their name servers were IPChina163.
Now, I don't know about you,
but I highly doubt that a US law firm
would be hosting its website in China,
through a China web host.
So that was red flag number two
of the many red flags that we're gonna run across.
So then I decide, well let's see what the address is,
where exactly is this location?
So I went into Google Maps
and I searched the address location,
and this is what I came up with, a field.
I mean if you turn around we're actually in a neighborhood,
and it's not a very high-end neighborhood at that,
so I can't imagine that a law firm
would locate themselves here.
It just doesn't make sense,
and obviously this would be the third red flag,
that their address isn't correct.
So the last thing I did here
which I thought would be kind of fun, is obviously,
the images here look somewhat real,
the original images, honestly were stock photos
that looked ridiculous, so it was quite clear.
But these would be convincing to me if I were to see them.
So I took and I searched for Andrew's text here.
I took Andrew's text and I searched for it in Google.
And you know what I found?
I happen to find a couple different law firms.
First the Jones law firm.
The Jones law in Manhattan
apparently has three lawyers named, can you guess?
Gillian Scott, Andrew Michaels and Robert Jeffries.
And there's yet another website, the Firm Partners,
who have Jillian Scott, Andrew Michaels and Robert Jeffries.
The more that I dug,
I finally realized where this was all coming from.
There is a website template on the company page Elementor,
which is a website building company for, you know,
people that are wanting to create their own websites,
and they have a template specifically for law firms,
called Markowitz and Mellencamp.
It's not a real law firm,
it's just a fake law firm that they've used
to highlight their website.
And if you look through here
it's just showing what you can do on your website.
And the Firm Partners, as you probably can guess
is Jillian Scott, Andrew Michaels and Robert Jeffries.
Same exact text.
They did go through instead of saying
Markowitz and Mellencamp on the Nody Law Firm,
they changed it to Nody Law, which was,
wow, a lot of work on their part
to really personalize this website.
But essentially what they've done
is they've scraped a template website,
set it up on their own servers, on nodylaw,
and tried to make me think
that they're a legitimate law firm.
So by now it's pretty clear
that this is not a real law firm.
More than likely this is a scam
that Jillian's trying to do on me,
but I'm interested to find out what she's doing.
So e-mail her back and say, "Hi Jillian,
"it's a pleasure to meet you.
"Can you please advise which images you believe
"are in violation of your client's copyright?"
I wanna see if she actually knows who I am,
and if she's gonna actually send me an image, and she did.
She said, "Hi, the first image on the website
"on this webpage," and she sent that to me.
Thankfully I looked it up,
and found out that I did in fact have the rights
to use that image,
I had purchased the rights to that image,
and so I was perfectly in the clear.
No problems whatsoever.
But I wanted to find out what she wanted.
"Oh man, I'm so sorry," I said.
"What kind of credit or payment is your client looking for?
"I'm just a small blogger."
Well, she replied,
"My client won't ask for payment do the hard time
"we're all going through all over the world."
She's trying to leverage the fact
that we're all going through
this COVID-19 pandemic at the moment,
which I think is ridiculous.
"He would appreciate a credit link to his website
"under the image or at the end of the article,
"image courtesy," and then the website.
There you have it, they're looking for a link, that's it.
I said, "I prefer not to put links in my blog,
"would you be willing to accept a payment?"
"Nothing lower than $5,000," she says.
"I can't afford that, how about I just take the photo down?"
And she says, "No, you already used the image
"and caused the damage to my client."
So she's pushing, she's continuing to try to get me
to add a link to the website,
and went on and on until finally
I just called her out and said,
"Listen, I know you're not a real law firm."
And I asked her some questions about this scam
to see if she would respond, and after that I got nothing,
total silence, she took down the website,
the e-mail address no longer works,
and I'm left to just wonder what new website
she's putting up, and new people she's trying to scam.
So that's all it was about, a link.
They wanted a free link on one of my websites.
It's really hard for me to believe,
and it really goes to show that not all scam e-mails
are about getting your social security number,
or your credit card number or your banking information.
There are a wide range of scams that could hit your inbox.
If this video is helpful give it a thumbs up,
let me know if this type of thing would be useful.
I can share with you more of the scam e-mails that I get.
Or leave a comment below with one of the scams
that you've received, I'd love to hear that as well.
Thanks for watching, and take care.