As if people aren’t already nervous enough about getting a surprise notice from a lawyer, now they have to worry about hackers using AI to scare the pants off them, too.

That’s what experts say is happening to some people, who are receiving legal threats from AI-generated attorneys.

One ill-fated day, Ernie Smith, the owner of the blog Tedium, got a copyright infringement notice from Will Thomas. They claimed to be a lawyer representing an Arizona-based firm, Commonwealth Legal.

“We’re reaching out on behalf of the Intellectual Property division of a notable entity, in relation to an image connected to our client.”

In general, these types of notices give the opportunity for the image to be taken down or risk being sued in court.

This one, though, requested Tedium link the allegedly copyrighted image (which came from a royalty-free image database) back to a gadget review site called Tech4Gods.

None of this was real, says Ali Shahriyari, chief technology officer of AI detection startup Reality Defender.

“All of the faces scanned were likely AI generated, most likely by a Generative Adversarial Network model.”

Also, the law firm doesn’t exist.

Tech4Gods owner Danie Barczak claims he had nothing to do with the link request, doesn’t know who would have done it, and says that someone has been “building spammy links” against his site for a while.

“I have mastered on-page SEO, but unfortunately, I buy links due to a lack of time. In the pas, I had a bad link builder. I wonder if it’s him going mad at me for letting him go…it’s hard to say because the web is massive, and everyone can link whenever they want.”

As AI scams go, this isn’t even a particularly smart one.

Hold onto your seats as they get better and better, though.

If you enjoyed that story, check out what happened when a guy gave ChatGPT $100 to make as money as possible, and it turned out exactly how you would expect.