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Scammers Hit Pirate Game Sites With 'Irreversible' Google Takedowns

posted by chromas on Tuesday December 11 2018, @06:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the [deleted] dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Every single day, rightsholders and their representatives scour the web for references to pirated content, which aren't hard to find. These links are then reported to various online services, such as Google, requesting their operators to remove the allegedly infringing content. This system works well in theory but it's being abused by scam-artists as well.

One of the most recent scams we've seen targets various popular game piracy sites[...] The notices in question are seemingly sent by prominent names in the gaming industry, such as Steam and Ubisoft. However, the sudden flurry of takedown requests appears to be initiated by scammers instead.

[...] The end result of these fraudulent notices is that thousands of URLs have been wiped from Google's search results by what appear to be scammers. In some cases, Google has rejected the requests, but many have been honored.

What certainly doesn't help is that the allegations are not incorrect per se. Pirated games often circumvent DRM. However, the scammy notices are sent out for a different purpose.

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/scammers-hit-pirate-game-sites-with-irreversible-google-takedowns-181130/

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  • (Score: 2, Redundant) by tangomargarine on Tuesday December 11 2018, @04:38PM (1 child)

    by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @04:38PM (#772926)

    If it were an open-source product the former wouldn't actually be illegal. But yeah, for AAA games that is unlikely to matter.

    Interestingly, this is one time where just quoting the first paragraph of the article makes things a lot clearer.

    Scammers are abusing Google's takedown system to remove popular game piracy sites from search results. The notices are not standard DMCA notifications. They accuse the sites of circumventing DRM instead, which means that there is no counter-notification option available. Making matters worse, malware-ridden sites are now rising in Google's search results.

    So this is a ploy by the guys distributing malware versions of the games, to try to increase the exposure of their products?

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  • (Score: 1, Redundant) by FatPhil on Wednesday December 12 2018, @08:30AM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Wednesday December 12 2018, @08:30AM (#773367) Homepage
    Quoting "circumventing DRM instead, which means that there is no counter-notification option available." doesn't make things clearer, because it raises the question "why the different types of claims?". Oh, I raised that already.
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