On a few occasions last year I wrote about a scam in which someone who pretends to be an attorney from a law firm called Nationwide Legal or Arthur Davidson Legal sends an email stating that a website owner has committed a copyright violation. The recourse that they seek is a link to another website for credit for the image. All of the details of the scam can be read here, here, and here. All that to say, the scam is back!
On Friday morning I got an email from someone claiming to be Victoria Boyd, Trademark Attorney at Nationwide Legal. It’s the same scam as before. The difference is that now the website for the fake firm is hosted a different domain since the old site was shuttered by the hosting service. The pictures are the same, the typos are the same, the nonsensical logic is the same, and the scam is the same.
Lessons for Everyone
2. If you do get an email from someone claiming to be an attorney (or similarly tries to appear authoritative) and it doesn’t seem right, look at all of the context clues. In this case there were a lot of context clues that made it fairly obvious that there was a scam at play. The first of those clues being that the email was addressed to “owner of website” and not to any particular person.
3. Don’t click on links in emails that you weren’t expecting.
