The Bass Fishing Archives site, which documents the history of the sport, has had its name stolen and a new site has been created featuring surf fishing. All of the material on the new site has been stolen from various surf-fishing sites throughout social media, including the YouTube channels Hook2Cook, Bearded Brad, Salt Strong, EliasVFishing, Bama Saltwater, BlackTipH and Die Hard Fishing. The channels of pro anglers John Crews and Brian Latimer have also been impacted. The site currently lists professional bass angler Clay Dyer as the author of all the content.
“This has been an absolute nightmare,” said Bass Fishing Archives owner Terry Battisti. “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 (AI) 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.”
Those who have information about this scam can contact Battisti via email at terry@bass-archives.com.
