When I called the number, I got the expected intercept message: "We're sorry, your call can not be completed as dialed..."
It gets even better... If you search for the two phone numbers on that page together, you'll find them on a whole bunch of sites, all presumably fake businesses:
It gets even better. On the front page of Taylor Wilson Smith it says
> Davis Robbins is a leading independent international law
When they were making their fake Taylor Wilson Smith site someone apparently had a copy paste error and included some text from their fake David Robbins site [1].
The fake Taylor Wilson Smith firm and the fake Mason Donald King firm both say they are at One Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10119. It is easy to find the tenant list for that building and there is, or course, no tenants with either of those names.
Another thing they botched when making up these firms is that none of the fake attorneys at Taylor Wilson Smith are named Taylor, Wilson, or Smith. Similar for the fake attorneys at Mason Donald King.
Davis Robbins, which has the same fake phone numbers as the other two, is at least at a different address, 12 Fremont Ave, Staten Island, NY 10306.
That's not even an office. It's a single-family house in a residential neighborhood.
Like the other two fake firms, none of their fake attorneys match the names of the firm.
Also, how many real law firms specialize both in copyright litigation and divorce? Yet the TWS, MDK and DR firms all do - and they just happen to have exactly the same list of six Practice Areas. The three sites were all hastily cloned from the same template. Not very convincing at all.
It really doesn't matter how obvious it is if you follow the easiest rule of not getting scammed:
- If anyone initiates contact with you, don't trust any claims they make about their identity.
If you only trust real law firms, verify that independently with whatever authority determines which law firms are real. People need to stop using "can make a professional-looking website" as a proxy for "not a scammer".
What characteristics signal this to you? I took a glance at the lawyers'* photos and can't easily determine that they're AI generated. I probably wouldn't give it a second thought if I didn't know ahead of time that they were generated.
It's the typical GANS face layout, with a blurry background, eyes centered and cropped to the face. It's certainly possible those are could be real people, but in my experience law firms usually have upper-body shots of the lawyers with their arms folded, or standing together as a team or with a client.
I wouldn't catch these at first glance, but the older gentleman specifically stands out to me with the
1. tuft of hair above the right eyebrow
2. teeth far offset from center
3. soap-bubble colored noise around the hair features
These aren't unusual on their own (except #3 maybe) but all together they make the photo seem fake.
I'm not great at this but in general
- Eyes exactly centered in the middle of the photo
- Earlobes/ears are different, e.g. attached vs unattached lobe on either side
- Boundaries of hair are confused/fuzzy
In each scam group, a member of team specialises in, making websites, for instance. Others are good at phishing, talking like a call center worker, and the list goes on. The info on how todo this is sold on dark web. So those scammers likely didnt even build these fake websites, they bought the templates.
(212) 555-1979
The 555 prefix is used for directory assistance or for fictitious phone numbers (e.g., in movies):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number)
When I called the number, I got the expected intercept message: "We're sorry, your call can not be completed as dialed..."
It gets even better... If you search for the two phone numbers on that page together, you'll find them on a whole bunch of sites, all presumably fake businesses:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=(800)+555-2840&ia=web