For years, fraudsters have abused copyright takedown notices to dupe Google into removing websites from its search engine. But now the company is trying to fight back.
On Monday, Google filed a lawsuit against two scammers based in Vietnam, who allegedly filed numerous false copyright takedowns with the company that targeted over 117,000 URLs.
“These fraudulent claims resulted in removal of over 100,000 businesses’ websites, costing them millions of dollars and thousands of hours in lost employee time,” Google says in a blog post.
The alleged scammers, Nguyen Van Duc and Pham Van Thien, exploited a Google system that businesses and people can use to report copyright violations under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Google will then take down the URL hosting the infringing content if it finds the request to be legit.
Nguyen and Pham allegedly abused the system by creating Google accounts that posed as large companies and celebrity representatives, including Amazon, Twitter, NBC News, along with Elon Musk and Taylor Swift, to trick Google into fulfilling the takedown requests.
The goal was to manipulate the company into removing retail listings of competitors from its search engine. According to the lawsuit, Nguyen and Pham are linked to a T-shirt business.
“For instance, Defendants falsely claimed to represent Amazon and alleged infringement of a t-shirt with the text ‘In 2006 Beyonce Said To The Left, To The Left And My Political Compass Was Born,’” Google’s lawsuit says. “In another instance, Defendants falsely claimed to represent Elon Musk, alleging infringement of a t-shirt with a logo with the text ‘Pharmacy Technician.’”
So far, the company’s investigation discovered that Nguyen and Pham allegedly created 65 Google accounts that targeted 117,000 URLs. But the lawsuits adds that the pair appear to be linked to other takedown requests “targeting more than half a million additional third-party URLs.”
The scheme also worked. The company says it “removed a significant number of third-party website URLs targeted by Defendants.” This includes search listings for one Google customer that paid the tech giant “tens of millions of dollars per year on Search Ads.”
Google eventually caught on the scheme. The lawsuits notes Google tracked Nguyen uploading a video to YouTube about how users can abuse Google’s copyright takedowns for search engine optimization. To stop the scammers, Google is asking the court to force Nguyen and Pham to pay damages, likely in the millions. The company also wants a permanent injunction that would ban the two from ever interacting with the search engine’s services again.
