Again in March I acquired an e-mail from a person boasting to be a Boston-based mental home attorney working for the legislation business of Arthur Davidson. The electronic mail was badly formatted and experienced some other faults that made me imagine the e-mail may possibly not be from a respectable attorney’s business office. The electronic mail also happened to get there on a working day when I was sensation significantly grumpy so I made the decision to do a minor sleuthing to see if I could unravel what I was fairly sure was a scam developed to get me to put a hyperlink to a nefarious web-site on my web site.
There ended up a great deal of routes that I could have taken to pulling back again the curtain on this scam. As you can see in the online video that I manufactured about it, I unraveled the rip-off by making use of some context clues which led me to then use some study instruments together with WHOIS lookup, reverse image research, Google Maps, and the Wayback Equipment.
April Update
In April I found out that a couple of other folks had gotten the very same e mail from Arthur Davidson and resolved to also unravel the rip-off. So much so that that the scammers switched from making use of the area ArthurDavidson.com to ArthurDavidsonLegal.com.
June Update and Summary…for now
Just out of curiosity I checked to see if ArthurDavidsonLegal.com was still becoming used to try out to operate a backlinking scam. It turns out that the web site has been suspended by the host. I’m guessing that more than enough folks or the appropriate particular person complained to the hosting provider and obtained the web-site suspended for working a fraud.
Motorcycles!
If the identify Arthur Davidson sounds acquainted to you outside of the context of a fake legal agency, you in all probability have an interest in motorcycles and or you instruct U.S. Heritage. Arthur Davidson was 1 of the founders of Harley Davidson. Did the scammers who established up the fake legal company of ArthurDavidson.com and ArthurDavidsonLegal.com know who Arthur Davidson was? Maybe. Did they opt for these domains to attempt to rank well in research benefits? Possibly, but I have no way of knowing that for confident.
You can study much more about the real Arthur Davidson and the founding of Harley Davidson Motorcycles in this pleasant Google Arts and Culture tale.