The Bass Fishing Archives site, which can be found online here and documents the history of the sport of bass fishing, has had its name stolen and a new site has been created featuring mostly surf fishing content. All of the material on this new site has been stolen from various surf fishing sites throughout social media and includes the YouTube sites Hook2Cook, Bearded Brad, Salt Strong, EliasVFishing, Bama Saltwater, BlackTipH, Die Hard Fishing, John Crews, and Brian Latimer. The site currently lists professional bass angler Clay Dyer as the author of all the content on the website.
“This has been an absolute nightmare,” said Terry Battisti, owner of the Bass Fishing Archives. “The fraudulent site was brought to our attention last week and since then over 400 websites, social media accounts, blogs, vlogs, and press releases have been set up. We’re doing all we can with each platform, but they keep popping up daily.
“It appears that whoever is doing this is using artificial intelligence to set up the sites, write the articles, and scrub the images from YouTube. There is no way one person can do this much work without some kind of help.
“We have contacted the Federal Trade Commission, the FBI, and the U.S. Copyright Office and have filed cases with all of them. We will get to the bottom of this in order to save everyone’s identities and copyrighted materials from the person or people who have stolen the materials.”
If you have any information on this attack, please contact Terry Battisti at terry@bass-archives.com.
