Have you received a bogus “DMCA takedown notice” from an individual (falsely) claiming to be a lawyer with the email address “legal.tomasross@gmail.com”? Was the claim based on a dubiously-dated post on a website called “Global News” or “Global Express News?” If so this might interest you.

Back in June, 2022 I got a bogus takedown notice for a post I’d written warning about a scam-like “domain listing” company that sends invoices that look like a domain registration renewal, charges more than 10x the actual price to renew a domain registration and… doesn’t actually renew your domain registration.

I’ve written about this problematic invoicing ploy several times… and received and debunked a bogus DMCA takedown notice last year. So I wrote about yet another similarly bogus “domain listing ploy the other day aaannnddd… this morning I got another bogus takedown notice, seemingly from the same “black-hat PR” individual

I want to be really clear that I’ve spoken to the real Thomas Ross named in some of these takedown notices and it’s absolutely clear someone is stealing his identity! I’ve spoken to other attorneys who’ve worked with the real Tomas and they’ve assured me he wouldn’t be involved with this sort of scam.

As I mentioned last June, the scam seems to involve finding negative blog posts, copying their contents and posting them to this “Global Express News” blog with a hacked earlier post date!

The “Global Express News” site seems to only *cough* post these sort of negative stories, marked as “no index” so they won’t show up in Google and other searches. After I made that earlier post others got in touch with me saying the same thing had happened to them.

The good news is

• These takedown notices are entirely bogus
• They’re not worded legally
• If you got one of these things you’re not the only one
• You can probably use this and my earlier blog post as evidence if your hosting provider or CND asks for an explanation