No cost Technological know-how for Lecturers: Conclusion to the Arthur Davidson Electronic mail Rip-off

Back in March I acquired an email from someone saying to be a Boston-based mostly intellectual house attorney working for the regulation agency of Arthur Davidson. The email was inadequately formatted and experienced some other mistakes that built me consider the e-mail might not be from a genuine attorney’s workplace. The email also took place to get there on a day when I was sensation specifically grumpy so I made a decision to do a very little sleuthing to see if I could unravel what I was quite specified was a scam intended to get me to put a hyperlink to a nefarious site on my weblog. 

There were a great deal of routes that I could have taken to pulling 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 investigate applications including WHOIS lookup, reverse image search, Google Maps, and the Wayback Machine. 

April Update

In April I uncovered that a couple other people had gotten the similar email from Arthur Davidson and made a decision to also unravel the fraud. So much so that that the scammers switched from employing 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 even now being utilised to attempt to run a backlinking rip-off. It turns out that the web-site has been suspended by the host. I am guessing that plenty of men and women or the appropriate individual complained to the hosting support and obtained the website suspended for working a fraud. 

Bikes!

If the identify Arthur Davidson appears acquainted to you outside of the context of a fake authorized business, you almost certainly have an desire in bikes and or you instruct U.S. History. Arthur Davidson was a single of the founders of Harley Davidson. Did the scammers who set up the fake lawful firm of ArthurDavidson.com and ArthurDavidsonLegal.com know who Arthur Davidson was? Perhaps. Did they decide on those domains to attempt to rank nicely in lookup effects? Probably, but I have no way of being aware of that for absolutely sure. 

You can understand a lot more about the authentic Arthur Davidson and the founding of Harley Davidson Bikes in this good Google Arts and Society story. 

https://www.youtube.com/view?v=KE7_sPrzF6w