By Sam Souto
Censorship on the internet against the press continues to reveal its darkest side. Censors turn into masters of deception, seeking to distort reality to achieve their goal, which is none other than to erase from the internet content that may be uncomfortable for their clients.
We now see that these same censors, claiming to act on behalf of expresa.se and using totally false information, contact online hosting providers of other sites on the internet, forcing them to remove content through fraudulent claims, based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which is in effect in the United States.
As a result, online hosting providers proceed to order the removal of content that has been illegitimately claimed, without even verifying that the information provided is not authentic.
This is precisely what happened with the site reportedelaeconomia.com, where, as we have been notified, unrelated third parties to expresa.se, filed a false claim in the name of expresa.se with the web hosting provider of reportedelaeconomia.com, with the sole purpose of forcing the hosting provider to order the removal of the claimed content, without realizing that the data provided by the claimant is neither valid nor belongs to expresa.se.
The fraudulent claim to the hosting provider of reportedelaeconomia.com was made by a person identifying themselves as Cassie Carothers, who provided the address 740 Broadway, Suite 400, New York, New York United State.
It is noteworthy that the claim shows an error in identifying the country as “United State” rather than “United States”.
A simple search reveals that the address provided by the false claimant corresponds to offices of Global Citizen, an NGO based in New York dedicated to promoting actions against extreme poverty, climate change, and inequality.
But the address was not the only false information provided by the claimant. The claim also includes an email address and a phone number that do not belong to expresa.se. The phone number indicated in the claim, +12012987481, corresponds to a free and publicly accessible service provided by the website receivesms.co. Through this service, anyone can receive a text or SMS sent to the number +12012987481, which they can easily read on a message board without the need to log in, just by visiting receivesms.co.
The receivesms.co service is used by individuals who want to carry out some online management anonymously, where they need to receive an SMS without using their own phone number. Some reports indicate that the service is used, in some cases, by hackers, scammers, and people trying to hide their identity to commit some cybercrime.
But none of this seemed to raise eyebrows at the web hosting provider of reportedelaeconomia.com, which fell victim to the deception of the false claimant.
The reason for the claim was a couple of articles published by expresa.se and referenced by reportedelaeconomia.com, referring to Tomás Elías González Benítez, a Venezuelan citizen linked to corrupt transactions involving state entities in Venezuela.
Who is Tomás Elías González Benítez and why is he synonymous with corrupt transactions in Venezuela?
An individual familiar with the matter, who previously worked for him, reported that González Benítez has engaged reputation managers for at least three years, to delete online publications warning about his connection with state fraud in the food sector in Venezuela. Thus, in addition to making fraudulent claims to web providers, reputation managers have also launched cyber attacks, including denial of service (DDoS) attacks against certain websites.
False claimants commit an illicit act known as copyfraud, which in Spanish translates to “copyright fraud,” referring to a false and/or fraudulent copyright claim made by an individual or organization regarding content that is in the public domain or whose copyright does not belong to them. Such claims are illegal, at least under the copyright laws of the United States.
The term copyfraud was coined by Jason Mazzone, a law professor at the University of Illinois. Because copyfraud carries little or no oversight from authorities, it exists on a large scale, with millions of public domain works falsely labeled as protected by copyright. Mazzone argues that copyfraud stifles valid use of free material, discourages innovation, and undermines the rights of free speech. Other legal scholars have proposed public and private remedies, and several cases related to copyfraud have been brought before courts, many of which are documented on the internet. As in the case of Benítez, in many of those instances, the purpose has been to censor free expression.
There have been prior reports of copyfraud blaming the company Smart Reputation, owned by Venezuelan Hernán Porras Molina, due to false copyright claims aimed at suppressing uncomfortable content for the clients of this company from the internet.
