If You Have a YouTube Channel, Watch Out for This Email Scam

Last fall I wrote about and made a short video about a phishing scam in which the sender pretends to be from YouTube support. Yesterday, I saw a new variation on that same scam appear in my inbox. 

As you can see in the screenshot above, the email subject line is Copyright Warning.pdf and the from address is YouTube Support (Google Docs). In the email there is just a link to a PDF that appears to be shared via Google Drive from YouTube. There are a few red flags in that email that instantly told me this was a scam. Here they are:

1. The email that this was sent to is not the email address that is connected to my YouTube account. In other words, it's not the one I use to log into and upload to my YouTube channel. 

2. In my actual YouTube account there were not any warnings in the copyright section. 

3. YouTube/ Google doesn't send PDFs via Google Drive to notify you of problems with your YouTube account or any other Google product. 

The difference between the scam email I received yesterday and the one that I got last fall is that yesterday's didn't use a generic Gmail address as the "from" address. Instead, it was changed to make it look like it came from a "no reply google docs" address. 

If you're interested in a video walk-through of this scam, watch my short video below. 

Applications for Education
I like to take scam email attempts like this one and use them as the basis for short lessons about cybersecurity. Emails the like the one I got today have some tell-tale signs of a scam that are fairly easy to spot. See if your students can spot them.

Some similar scams that I've unraveled in the last couple of years include this one about image attribution and this one also about image attribution from someone pretending to be a lawyer.

The Nationwide Legal DMCA Scam Returns - There's a Lesson Here

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

1. Don't be a lame SEO backlink scammer.

 
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.

Resources on Copyright

• Copyright for Teachers - A Webinar With Dr. Beth Holland
• Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center
• Copyright and Creative Commons Explained by Common Craft
• How to File a DMCA Takedown Notice With Google
• How to File a Copyright Claim on Facebook

An Update to Unraveling an Email Scam

About a month ago I published a video and blog post in which I explained the process that I used to unravel an email scam in which someone claimed to be an intellectual property attorney pursuing a case against me. That blog post turned out to be one the most popular things that I've published this year so I thought that I would provide an update on what has happened since then. 

I replied to the email with an explanation of why the claim was bogus and that they could get lost. I never heard back after that. But since the website was still saved my Chrome profile and predicted whenever I entered URLs beginning with the letter A, I kept an eye on the site. Yesterday morning the site went dead. 

Other People Who Exposed the Scam

After seeing that the site had gone offline my curiosity got the best of me and I went down a rabbit hole of looking to see if there are other people like me who got the same scam email and decided to eviscerate the scammers. I did a search on Twitter and quickly found a few others who came to the same conclusion that I did. 

Shawna Newman was the recipient of the same scam email back in February. Apparently, when she called them out on it they changed the address on their website from New York to Boston. Here's her Tweet about it. 

Ray Alexander got the same scam email and took the approach that I did. He wrote a lengthy blog post detailing how he unraveled the scam. Here's his Tweet and here's his blog post. 

Ben Dickson also received the email and decided to publish an unraveling of the scam. Here's his Twitter thread on the topic. 

Lessons for Everyone

1. Don't be a lame SEO backlink scammer.

 
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.