Fantastic: Now British Firms Are Getting In On The Bogus Website/Bogus DMCA Notice Scam

from the YET-ANOTHER-ANOMALY dept

Tue, May 24th 2016 6:23am — Tim Cushing

Here we go again: intellectual property laws being abused to silence critics. In this case -- which resembles the tactics exposed by Pissed Consumer recently -- bogus copyright claims contained in bogus DMCA notices are being used to remove negative reviews from websites.

In this case, it's a British firm -- one that first tried to abuse that country's oft-abused defamation laws.

[Annabelle] Narey, who is the head of programme at an international children’s charity, had turned to London-based BuildTeam for a side return extension, but almost six months later, the relationship had turned acrimonious. The build, which was only supposed to take 10–14 weeks, was still unfinished, she wrote. “On Christmas day a ceiling fell down in an upstairs bedroom,” she says, apparently due to an issue with the plumbing. “Mercifully no one was hurt. [That] there seem to be so many glowing reports out there it is frankly curious. Proceed at your own risk,” the review concluded.

BuildTeam disputes her account. In a letter sent to Mumsnet, which the site passed on to Narey, the builders complained that the comments were defamatory. They say it is “untrue” that the ceiling fell down due to an issue with plumbing, and cited a total of 11 statements they claimed were defamatory.

Mumsnet refused to remove the post, so BuildTeam decided to start harassing Narey at her home, showing up with printouts of the negative review and asking for it to be taken down. BuildTeam's reps refused to discuss Narey's accusations or verify for themselves the damage allegedly caused by their work. They were only interested in the removal of the review.

More unsatisfied customers joined Narey's thread at Mumsnet. So, BuildTeam decided to nuke the entire thread from orbit by abusing the DMCA process and IP laws meant to protect artistic endeavors, not shoddy construction work.

As soon as the DMCA takedown request had been filed, Google de-listed the entire thread. All 126 posts are now not discoverable when a user searches Google for BuildTeam – or any other terms. The search company told Mumsnet it could make a counterclaim, if it was certain no infringement had taken place, but since the site couldn’t verify that its users weren’t actually posting copyrighted material, it would have opened it up to further legal pressure.

But there was no copyright infringement. The DMCA notice links back to a bogus site created solely for the purpose of posting the review BuildTeam wanted removed, backdating it so it appeared to predate Narey's complaint, and use that post as the basis of a bogus takedown request.

The website crafted for the purpose of crafting bogus takedown requests follows the same M.O. we've seen elsewhere: random bits of content are scraped to create the appearance of a legitimate website. After that, the reviews companies/individuals want to see vanished are mixed in and DMCA notices issued.

Someone calling themselves "Douglas Bush" now claims Narey's negative review of BuildTeam was written by him, according to his overwrought DMCA takedown request.

I'm upset at finding out my article was copied without my permission starting at "Do not be taken in by the slick facade this company presents to the public", word for word, till the very end. My name was also removed from the post, and now it looks like it's not mine. I flagged the post and mentioned that it was stolen, but they did not remove it (about a month passed). At least I want it to be removed from Google. Thank you

As the Guardian's Alex Hern points out, there is no "Douglas Bush."

The post, headlined “Buildteam interior designers” was backdated to September 14 2015, three months before Narey had written it, and was signed by a “Douglas Bush” of South Bend, Indiana. The website was registered to someone quite different, though: Muhammed Ashraf, from Faisalabad, Pakistan.

BuildTeam denies having anything to do with Ashraf, Bush, the bogus website, or its bogus DMCA takedown notice -- a statement that deserves no more credibility than "Douglas Bush" himself. This sort of thing does not happen in a vacuum. It may be that BuildTeam has created plausible deniability by placing a series of intermediaries between it and this bogus DMCA takedown, but it's no coincidence that a review it wanted removed badly enough it sent reps to Narey's house has now been destroyed by a scraper site doing double duty as a half-assed reputation management service.

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Filed Under: abuse, censorship, dmca, reviews, uk
Companies: buildteam, mumsnet

32 Comments

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Anonymous Howard II, 24 May 2016 @ 6:37am

Streisanded
So that's BuildTeam, a company to avoid like the fecking plague.

Got that? BuildTeam.

Once more for good measure, BuildTeam.
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Mason Wheeler (profile), 24 May 2016 @ 6:57am

it's no coincidence that a review it wanted removed badly enough it sent reps to Narey's house has now been destroyed by a scraper site doing double duty as a half-assed reputation management service.

I like that. Call them a HARM service; it's quite fitting.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2016 @ 6:59am

re:Anonymous Howard II
Sorry, who was that again?

Was it http://buildteam.com/ you say?
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2016 @ 7:07am

If we can help out...
Maybe we should do BuildTeam a favor and recreate this thread of 126 negative reviews right here in the comments section? You know, for commenting purposes...
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2016 @ 7:08am

Trolling mumsnet?
5 points for annoying some of my least favourite people on the internet.

-10 for using this scammy method to do so.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2016 @ 7:18am

Re: Streisanded
You've named it three times! You may have attracted its attention! The Elder One is coming!
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DannyB (profile), 24 May 2016 @ 7:26am

Copyright = Censorship
If you create the greatest censorship tool in the history of mankind, don't be surprised when people start using it for the purposes of censorship.

Digital Millennium Censorship Act

But to engage in far greater censorship you would need SOPA. Or you would need to pretend like it became law when it actually did not.
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Berenerd (profile), 24 May 2016 @ 7:26am

Re: re:Anonymous Howard II
Did you notice the "Find a scheme" box right in the center of BUildteam's site? I think we found proof of their schemes to keep negative reviews away. Maybe Buildteam needs to spend more money on doing work the right way rather than on attacking Buildteam's own customers.
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Berenerd (profile), 24 May 2016 @ 7:39am

What I find funny...
They went to Google to get it removed, but its still on Bing and yahoo.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2016 @ 7:40am

and if Google was to do it's job and Congress it's job, this sort of thing would never happen but because those who make the laws are 'encouraged' to leave out every possibility that false accusations can lead to as big a fine/jail time as genuine accusations, it will continue to put genuine grievances under the cosh!!
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Ben (profile), 24 May 2016 @ 7:42am

But what did they accomplish?
So they created a website that held exactly the same content; did they then remove that site after the DMCA notice took down the "original"? Otherwise all those complaints about BuildTeam are still there in the web and should be found by Google's crawler.

They've effectively doubled the instances of the complaints on the web.
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DannyB (profile), 24 May 2016 @ 7:57am

Re: What I find funny...
If it is removed from Google then it has been removed completely from the Internet.

Bing and Yahoo are just internet wannabes. Not the real internet like Google.

It is amazing how long TCP/IP existed before Google came along and invented the internet. But all those years were just build up of infrastructure so that Google could build the internet.
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DannyB (profile), 24 May 2016 @ 8:00am

Re:
Since most swords cut both ways, there must be some way that this way of abusing the DMCA with impunity can be used against those who created such awesome censorship powers.

You know some old saying about how the goose and gander have compatible ports, or something like that.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2016 @ 8:16am

If IP extremists really cared for artist they would be demanding more protections for artists that have their works falsely taken down. Instead they only demand laws that help distributors at the expense of both artists and the public.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2016 @ 8:40am

Re: Re: What I find funny...
File this perception (that Google = the internet) under the "taking my picture steals my soul" school of thought. Or maybe the "how do they get all those tiny actors into my TV set" line of thinking.

It's just gobsmacking how many otherwise intelligent people believe Google is inside their computer.
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DannyB (profile), 24 May 2016 @ 9:18am

Re: But what did they accomplish?
Once they get the original content taken down, I don't think they care about keeping their copy up any longer.

The purpose was censorship. Mission accomplished. Everyone happy.

Copyright did what it is intended to do (these days).
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Bergman (profile), 24 May 2016 @ 12:01pm

Re: Re: Streisanded
Iä! Iä! BuildTeam fhtagn!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2016 @ 12:01pm

BuildTeam / Bust team
Sounds to me like a company not to go to if you need any building work done in the UK
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That One Guy (profile), 24 May 2016 @ 1:21pm

'Working as intended'
If only there was some penalty for fraudulently using the law to censor stuff you don't like...

Oh right, there is no penalty because that's not how it was written, it's meant to be so completely one sided that there's only incentive to remove, never incentive to keep something up, and making a takedown claim carries no risk while contesting it very much does.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2016 @ 1:29pm

Hmm, Google pulls down this British thing without blinking, but says no way to something else in the article directly above this one.

Doesn't add up, does it?

Honeypot, anyone?
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That One Guy (profile), 24 May 2016 @ 1:30pm

"I'm less offended that you lied as I am that you think I'm stupid enough to believe you."
BuildTeam denies having anything to do with Ashraf, Bush, the bogus website, or its bogus DMCA takedown notice -- a statement that deserves no more credibility than "Douglas Bush" himself.

Yes, of course, clearly some random guy in Pakistan just one day decided to fraudulently copy a comment that BuildTeam had been harassing the poster to take down for the sole purpose of fraudulently claiming that he had written it and demanding it's removal. Makes perfect sense.

They may have plausible deniability in that it's likely impossible to prove a connection between them and the fraud, but they most certainly don't have believable deniability, as to imagine that the events that occurred were just 'coincidental' in achieving exactly what they wanted but had been unable to gain beforehand stretches probability well beyond the breaking point.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2016 @ 1:44pm

Nothing like committing intentional fraud to hide your businesses shoddy work.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2016 @ 2:15pm

Chicken
The trouble is not Buildteam and their hirelings but companies like Mumsnet which cave in without a fight.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2016 @ 2:22pm

Re: Streisanded
Dear BuildTeam,

Welcome to Club Streisand.

Much like Hotel California, you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.

- The Internet

[Not often enough does an Eagles fair use get deployed...asshats.]
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That One Guy (profile), 24 May 2016 @ 3:58pm

Re: Chicken
Depends on whether or not they have the money to fight back. It's hard to fault a small company for caving if fighting back will bankrupt them, even if by giving in once they make it more likely that they'll get the same treatment later on. If a large company does it though... yeah, they deserve to be called out on their stupidity and the fact that doing so just emboldens those sending out the threat/shakedown letters.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2016 @ 5:42pm

What about con-artists?
Won't somebody think about the artists?
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Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2016 @ 8:16pm

Whatever just hates it when due process is enforced.
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PaulT (profile), 24 May 2016 @ 11:40pm

Re: Chicken
Erm, no. The problem is a system that allows things like this to go unchallenged:

"BuildTeam decided to start harassing Narey at her home, showing up with printouts of the negative review and asking for it to be taken down"

You're honestly saying that the person who was being personally harassed (after putting up a fight, btw) is the problem and not the people who decided to do such over a bad review?
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Matthew Cline (profile), 25 May 2016 @ 8:52am

Re: But what did they accomplish?
The site probably has a robots.txt to prevent any content from being index, so it won't show up in any search results.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 25 May 2016 @ 9:59am

Re: Re: Re: What I find funny...
Cameras cannot steal your soul because (choose 1):

1. God would not allow it

2. Cameras cannot do that

3. There are no such things as souls.
(if you are working in Finance this is true no matter what)
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That One Guy (profile), 25 May 2016 @ 1:18pm

Re: Re: Chicken
The response to harassment like that seems simple enough, and potentially funny too.

"You have until I make it to the control box for the sprinkler system before you get soaked. There will be no warning if you do this again."
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Niall (profile), 30 May 2016 @ 6:11am

Forget
Can we invoke BuildTeam's right to be forgotten...utterly?
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