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are the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And when you rank position one on Google, a friend of mine once said that you're like a wild pig. Hello everyone and welcome back to a new episode of iGaming Daily the SBC podcast and the marketing part where we talk everything and anything marketing related and today we are having a very very top top hot topic DMCA's fake DMCA's attacks on your website. It is everywhere you open your fridge fake DMCA fell out of it because it became a news port in 2026 and nobody is safe Affiliates are being attacked big operators small operators new operators Everyone is having some Problems with the MCA is nobody is safe and this is why we're talking about is my guest today is Sean Bianco You probably know him. He was guest in this podcast several times me and Sean Deal with it the MCA is daily. We talk about it. We restore it. So I thought he would be a really good guest Hello, Sean. Welcome to the podcast so I mean, I think last time we spoke, Ivana, on this podcast was before Christmas. And I think the conversation went around, went along the terms of this is something which is here, it's here to stay, it's not going anywhere. And if you're ignoring it, sucks to be you. And now we're seeing that coming into reality. ah it's until around three, four weeks ago, it looked as though DMCA strikes were almost exclusively hitting people who are ranking on unregulated keywords with affiliate sites and hitting some of the regulated affiliate sites also. Now it seems as though this has spilled over into actual brands. So some of the brands that your grandmother would know about in their living room having a mug of tea when the World Cup is going on, those kinds of brands are being hit. not only the ones which operate in the shadows. It seems as though, I would say that there's potentially a little bit of scale happening over here also. It's gotten uh more eloquent, let's say, in the way that it's happening. I mean, Ivana and I are working on these all day. Recently, especially the past three, four weeks, it's become just people calling myself and Ivana and... Hey, I just lost 50 % of my traffic or hey, I just lost all my traffic. What do I do next? And it's one of those things where before it was treated like a security, like web security. So I used to work in the web security field, like anti hacking vulnerability scanning. So I had worked with like big American companies. That's how I got into SEO, strangely enough, from learning how to hack and therefore prevent hacks um over 10 years ago. And what we're seeing is this, what I'm seeing at least is the same kind of attitude which people had when dealing with their security, when dealing with DMCIs because this is a web vulnerability. This is an attack. This is a vulnerability to a revenue generating assets, which most people have. Now the problem with web security is that people tend to deal with it once they get hit. They don't take preventative measures. And for the most part, I would say that's the right approach. But the issue is that when people are getting hit, they're getting hit and they realize that they've been hit when they have identified that rankings have disappeared and revenue has already declined. So let's just say you're operating an iGaming brand. And let's just say that a single page, which is the case in many markets, is generating, just to give you a round number, 100k for you per month. And you get a DMCA strike. So someone files a notice that you've infringed on their copyright. Google doesn't process this straight away. It's going to go through the process of eating it. And some of them are going to be processed. Some of them might not. Once this DMCA strike comes into effect, Google will remove your index URL from its index. And therefore, all of the keywords related to that. Now, if you are not educated on DMCA strikes and you haven't seen this happen to your brand before, typically, it's like a beehive. where everyone gets agitated and starts, you know, revenues dying, FTDs are decreasing, our NDCs are decreasing, and it's a whole shit show, just to speak completely frankly from what I've seen over here. So everyone starts going into their audits, they start going into their preventative measures, they start calling everybody, they start trying to deal with it themselves. And most of the time what we've seen is before people even realize that they've been struck with a DMCA strike, if they haven't done, if they haven't been monitoring this, they've already lost two weeks of momentum. So now put a D index URL of 100 K per month of an NDCs. Okay. And your affiliates commissions or your CLTV or your FT or your FT deposit value. Right. I mean, you're looking at 50 K in the first 12 to 15 days of losses. And every minute that goes on. that you do not recover that, the loss is compound. And the long-term, like, Evanna, we've dealt with people who had been trying to recover from a DMCA strike for two months and didn't manage. They spoke to us. How long did it take? 12 hours? Yes, the recovery times are crucial. If you don't know what you're doing, you might not recover it ever. If you know what you're doing, you can be done within 12 to 24 hours. First of all, I want to differentiate here between removing the DMCA claim and recovering. So first you will need to remove the DMCA claim. You will get email from Google saying, actually we made a boo boo. This is okay, not stolen content. We're recovering you. And that's great. You can get this within an hour from Google of appealing. And then it needs to go back to Google index. That takes another 12 to 24 hours. So please keep that in mind. Two different things, apples and oranges here. And as well, I saw a horrible claims people actually don't know what they're doing and they're creating massive delays on their own because they first of all don't know where to appeal they don't know how to appeal and they don't know really what to do because if you are not living and breathing the MCA is like I do then you might be overwhelmed you might be lost because it's not exactly SEO work it's more like paralegal so yes It takes time and your revenue is being lost. Learn how OptiMove's positionless marketing is changing how iGaming teams operate. Discover how operators are using OptiMove's positionless marketing platform to launch personalized CRM campaigns, dynamically change casino lobbies and bet slips and create engaging game-wide experiences. Learn more at OptiMove.com. you know, to go on what you said over here, this is really reminding me of when I used to work in the security field. So when I used to work in the security field, you'd get these... frantic people calling you like, oh my God, this has happened and it's going to impact my business to this amount and so forth. okay, did you, you know that there are ways that you can protect yourself. You know that these things are happening. Okay. Therefore, if you work in SCO nowadays, even if you don't work on SCO, okay. So let me give you a couple of examples how this is not just limited now to unrelated, unregulated affiliates. It's not limited anymore to unregulated affiliates and regulated affiliates. It's now impacting actual brands. And it's now impacting your actual ability to rank potentially in the local language that you're targeting if all of your URLs are removed from that target domain. And what I've seen is that Google doesn't care if you're spending one, two, three million per month on BPC. It doesn't give a damn because it's a completely different system. And these systems do not talk to each other. So you know. Ivana and I last week worked on something which shocked us to be quite honest with you. It was a household name, one of the biggest in the world. Obviously, we will never mention any names, but let's just put it this way, everyone listening to this knows who these people are. And we were shocked to see that they have been hit by the MCA strikes and also in the notices that a lot of other competitors who cover the rest of the market are also being hit by the MCA strikes. And in many cases are being deindexed by Google. And it's the same like brand jacking, right? So when brand jacking came along, people didn't really take it seriously. And now it's proliferated. It didn't go away. When Parasite SCO came along, people didn't pay too much attention. Now it's proliferated. It's not going away. And DMCA strikes, negative SCO attacks. When it comes to spam links, when it comes to DMCA, when it comes to negative CTR manipulation, I had gone on a podcast with all this a while back when I said, there are the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Yeah. And when you rank position one on Google, a friend of mine once said that you're like a wild pig that is put out to run and people start aiming at you and trying to shoot. Right. So being positioned one on Google is now a dangerous place to be because these four horsemen of the apocalypse are going to come and they're going to attack you. And it's not limited anymore to the people that everyone thought it was. Now it's just become a disaster. Now we don't know who's doing it anymore. Even though we didn't have the proof that those people we thought were doing it, were doing it, everyone kind of knew in the industry. But now we don't know if anyone's doing it. We don't know the purpose of these attacks. We don't know if it's going to grow. I mean, in some cases you can see thousands of notices per day, per day. So you know. How are you going to protect yourself against those things, especially Ivana, maybe you can add some more insight over here, when the tools which you get don't make it easy for you to determine where you've been attacked, how frequently, and what you need to deal with. Unfortunately, these attacks are growing. is not a secret. We had few of them last year, and we thought, OK, nice, somebody's keeping this. fake DMCA as a weapon, we clean it up. Some people didn't even bother to clean up because they thought not my money pages, so I'm just gonna leave it as is. I'm not gonna bother. And suddenly DMCA's are everywhere and your website is drowning and you don't know what's happening to you. If you are very lucky and you get DMCA, Google sends you an email saying, hey, we have problem with this URL of your website. because somebody reported that you stole their content and used it without their permission. And therefore, because we are legally obliged, we have removed it from our index. Therefore, you will not be able to be found through Google search. However, if this is wrong, feel free to use this link. They give you exactly where to go and tell us why this is wrong. And then you go step by step, sort of easy. In most cases, you are not this lucky. Your pages are disappearing left and right. Your traffic is disappearing. Your revenue is disappearing. You are basically disappearing and you don't know what's happening. So either you are an SEO that doesn't know what is fake DMCA and that this is hitting your website. Trust me. I saw this. People just see that their pages are losing traffic and they cannot analyze why this is because they don't know this attack is happening. So if your pages suddenly lost lots of traffic and there wasn't a Google update, you didn't pick up a manual penalty. Chances are it is a fake DMCA. Please check for these. If you establish it's a fake DMCA and you are not experienced, you don't know where to appeal because Google did not send you a link. So people tend to go to wrong links and then send this claim to completely unrelated department. These departments don't talk to each other. It's Google is not user friendly. They don't really have your uh interest in their heart. So you might not be able to appeal it ever because you don't know what you're doing. So make sure to find the proper link for the counter notices. Okay. And then there is another problem. Even if you find that some URLs are de-indexed, you need to find the Lumen claim to see like, okay, this URL, this Lumen, yes, it was de-indexed, Google, please restore it. But Lumen is one big database of bottlenecks. Okay. It's the biggest bottleneck in this process because Lumen database is a hardware software and it stores all the information that are reported to Google, not just DMCA's, but obviously massively DMCA's, but to Google you can report anything else or governmental reports. There is defamation reports and all of this is reported to Google transparency report. And then they send it to Lumen database. And then you need to find that Lumen claim. with your URL and say, this URL, this Lumen claim, please restore me. You go to Lumen, because we are abusing it so much, many times it just does not work, does not load, gives you five or three. Overload it, doesn't work down, whatever. If it loads, you have one claim. Okay, you are able to open one Lumen notice and imagine you have got 20 in one day. And you don't know which Lumen has got which URL. So you need to be clever finding this. Lumen is very, very buggy. And you need to give them an email. Then they send you an access to this Lumen notice and you will find all of the problematic URLs and you can start to appeal them. And now let's say you have got 20 notices, 200 of your URLs are done and you... open one with not an important URL and it's just one there. And then you need to open another one. However, it tells you, you already use this email address and you cannot see this new claim. Waffle Neck, you're out. You're thinking I'm going to open more emails to break the system. However, Lumen knows it is you. So even if you use Ivana1, Ivana2, Ivana3, Ivana7, they will know it's you again. Okay, so they will once again not give you the access because they will say, recently claimed, please wait. And it's usually one in 24 hours. So we need to have a whole system. So DMCA's, even though they had the best thought behind it, are really being abused against us. The problem is that when Bill Clinton signed the bill in 1998, he meant it well, okay, because he just thought... We are living more digitally. There are pictures, there are videos, and I need to protect this for people. Perfectly legit. But poor Bill couldn't think that somewhere in iGaming in 2025, 2026, there'll be an SEO terrorist thinking, I'm going to abuse it and take down all of my competitors. And then this will become a fantastic weapon for iGaming terrorism. So let's not blame the MCA. The point of the MCA is very good. Let's blame the terrorists and the abuse of it. As well, Google is really, really, really not prepared for this. They don't know why this is happening, why they are suddenly having so many reports and so many counter notices. And I would say the best thing you can do is being very, very vigilant, keeping an eye on URLs that are losing traffic, making sure that you review if you are not getting emails from Google about being taken down. And as well, protection. There are places where you can actually protect your top pages. There is dmca.com, which helps you register your top money pages. I think the software is something like $10 a month per page, but it will protect you. Doesn't mean you will never get a DMCA tag, but it means you will recover much faster because it's registered in this governmental database that you are the original owner of the content, of the copy, picture, text, whatever. As well, there is DMCA Boss. This is a tool that resolves the bottleneck between URLs that are being de-indexed and Lumen. As well, it sends you all of the information to your email, to your Slack, to your WhatsApp, whatever you like, and it will tell you, found these 20 URLs being de-indexed. These are the Lumens. Go and claim. There is actually a part to help you do counter notices as well. So there are ways to make your life easier. Of course, there are, but you need to know about them. So I keep saying protection and BVJU. Do DMCA.com, do DMCABoss.com. They can really, really, really help. And they can help you restore your revenue much, much faster. Yeah. And there's no amount of relationship they can have with Google, with the amount of money that they spend on ads, which is going to help circumvent this action. or expedite any kinds of processes because they're two completely different systems. And that's something which is important to mention also. mean, DMCA's people have different ways of dealing with them also. OK, so we've seen that affiliates have moved away from the part of having a single asset to having multiple assets. So they have a lot of satellites and a lot of preparation so that if something goes wrong, there's something else to go to. like, I know. quite a few affiliates, and in some cases I've recommended this also, that when it's beyond kind of repair, when you have DMCA, you've had negative link attacks, you've had DDoS, I'm not going to mention the words of one of the attacks, which is like a nuclear warhead, so I'm not going to mention it because I don't want people to know about this stuff. I don't want that we talk about this and then suddenly it starts happening, but we've observed it. So we've seen. that these things happen. And once they happen, like there are two options. Either you go down the DMCA recovery route, but then you still have a range of other issues to deal with, or you have a plan B. And your plan B needs to be, okay, how do I take this asset? How do I recover, not recover it, but how do I make sure that it still has value? And I still funnel it into an ecosystem where that value can be funneled up the chain in terms of authority, keyword rankings and so forth. And it's basically like an SOP. And if this sounds like fiction to you, this is the world we live in. Unfortunately, I was on a panel in Malta a couple uh of weeks ago and one of the private groups afterwards, someone was mentioning some things that I said like, it's so sad that nowadays you have to have so many assets just in case you get attacked, you have a Plan B. But this is the world we live in. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you're not preparing to have a Plan B, C and D, then you're just leaving yourself vulnerable. Now, the worrying part, I would say, for these big brands is that I would say it almost looks as though there's probing going on right now. So what's happening? I don't know if it's probing or if it's just they're getting caught in the fight because let's say in the UK, as an example, a casino brand will rank on like 45 % of the search volume keywords that exist on that market, right? So it could be the affiliates are trying to take that and there's automation and it's just accidentally targeting these domains, right? I don't know if that's it or if it's probing, right? To see what damage can be done to take their place. I would really be worried if it's probing right now. And this is just like, you know, the beginning of the story because probing is trying to expose vulnerabilities to then action on them eventually. I really hope that's not the case because if that's the case, when you have really big brands, they can't just redirect to another asset. They most of the time can't even create a subdomain within four weeks, right? They're not able to create structures that can funnel authority from one area to another. So it's like those are domains where in general, since they're big household names, you don't do anything outside of safety. Why? Because if you do anything out of safety, and you'd nuke the domain, then you're going to nuke all of the other marketing activity, which is bringing players towards the website from branded searches. And I was having a conversation with a person on Monday and we're now on Wednesday. So this was just on Monday. said, and we're talking to them about building up, building up their results and so forth as we do. They're like, listen, we don't want to do any black hat SEO. So they make it a very big point, know, spend a lot of money on Google. We want to have a good relationship. want to make sure that everything we do is right. And I'm like, OK, let me check some things out quickly. And I start looking in the Lumen database. 99 pages of DMCA is filed against these people. Their results have decreased by 90 % on brand keywords over the past uh six months. That there's basically no hope for these guys to avoid Black Hat SEO anymore because negative SEO is Black Hat SEO. So even if you're not running Black Hat SEO on your own domain, you are automatically participating in Black Hat SEO because other people are attacking you. So, you know, I'm building out right now some, let's say information, which is going to help people understand. Even if they're like completely I'm only in white hats, I'd protect my brand and all of these things. Great. I agree with you completely, but you need to know what's happening in your market. And if you're being attacked for like six months and you have absolutely no idea about it, you're like, oh, I think I'm just getting the bad side of Google updates. But you have like 99 pages of looming requests, looming filings for DMCA uh complaints. Then maybe you have to start understanding what you're fighting against. And you need to start participating in certain things if you want to actually rank. So yeah, this is the world we live in. mean, myself and Ivana, maybe this can be a shameless. shameless plug over here, we do help people protect their revenue from DMCA strikes. So if you do have these issues right now, feel free to reach out to us. But I just want to leave with one note. And that's that this is not something which is only related to iGaming. So do I have time for one more note, Ivan, or is that a wrap up? One more note. OK, we're good. We're good to go. So I was looking for an air purifier around eight months ago. You know? bit of a joke over here have a big nose because air is free right but when you have an air purifier is no longer free and I was looking for an air purifier and I started looking for reviews online right and you read reviews and you also watch videos on YouTube you know there are the big brands like Dyson and so forth but you also know that there are lesser known brands which could potentially be even better right and I came across a video of a gentleman who owns a review website specifically for air purifiers who wrote a review for a European brand that seems to be charging like 500 bucks for an air purifier, which costs 30 bucks from China. So they're buying it, sticking some branding on, and resetting it. And within a couple of days of writing this review, his website started getting DMCA strikes. He got removed from Google. His business was taken down. So I mean, everyone who says, Google's not going to care about this because it's only an I, because Google doesn't care about iGaming in terms of iGaming companies making money from search results. Google doesn't care in general. Google doesn't care in general. In general. So this is not an iGaming thing. This is an industry thing. This is an SEO thing. So if you don't know about it, that you are an SEO, not only inside of iGaming, but also outside of iGaming, I mean, unfortunately, if you're going to write things online that people don't like you writing about, this is probably what's going to be happening to you in the future. That's what I have to leave in terms of a note. That's the last thing I have to say. Unfortunately, Sean, I think this is probing. It is probing because I can see that the same URLs are being attacked over and over and over again. And this is another issue that Google didn't count with. Why would they? So the second and third attacks on the same URL are the real problem here. Why? When you get the first attack, There is a system how to recover you either get the email from Google or there is a link for the counter notice where you just simply follow the steps and it exists and it helps you. If you get a second attack on the same URL, which usually happens within days. So let's say you recover this one first of May and another attack comes seven of May. It's within a week. And you re you report it again to Google saying, hello, counter notice here. And they'll look at it and they'll say, Chill, we just recovered it for you. Please do not submit this. We are done with you. Unfortunately, they don't understand it is a separate attack. They don't. Which makes it much more difficult for you to recover, which means you need to be creative. You need to go to the legal forms, need to explain you were already recovered. Now this is happening. You need to track everything. And the legal form works usually within 48 hours. Sometimes it doesn't work at all. They just close it without letting you know. So the second and third attacks had a real, real problem. And I think the attackers know it. They're watching you like, okay, they recovered fantastic. We took 35 days of the revenue, yay for us. Now let them celebrate for a few days and we take it down again. And then we watch them how they cannot recover it for another five months and your revenue is disappearing. So there has to be a system or ideally there will be a system where we can appeal second and third time. This... notices do not exist in Google. So unfortunately it is what it is. As well, I would like to recommend that you as professionals, if you are not sure what you are doing, stop losing time, stop losing revenue. Don't wait two, three months. If you are trying and you are not getting replies back or you're getting replies in a way, we are having a lot of these. We'll get back to you and get back to you. This means you can be waiting a month, two, three. Get in touch with somebody who knows what they're doing because it is a huge difference if you are losing revenue for one day, one month or three months. Okay. So I would say this is a good investment to get a help of professionals. It is very much of a sort of paralegal work. And as well, I want to say this very important thing that people don't realize how dangerous DMCA's are and how easy they are. First of all, the attacker attacks you completely for free. There is no cost, usually negative SEO in a shape of negative CTR attacks, DDoS attacks or links attacks are costly. DMCA, fake DMCA stakedowns cause nothing, just a few minutes of their time. Filling up these fake forms or real forms with fake information, again, question of minutes. Then Google the index view without actually thinking twice about it. And then... The actual risk for the person that is sending you all of these attacks is minimal. None. mean, Google does not really check anything. don't. They say that is under a penalty of these undead and you should not do it. But the attackers don't care. They are terrorists in heart. They don't care. They should not do it. On the other hand, the attacked one. Attacker takes your revenue for free. You are losing revenue immediately and you're bleeding. And it depends which page they take, but could be hundreds of thousands of euros uh monthly, right? We know which are the massive keywords and which positions brings us money. So you are immediately losing. You are immediately losing money. It's costly for you immediately. The recovery time for them submitting it, it's question of minutes. Your recovery time. If you don't know what you're doing, it's 10 days plus, sometimes months. And even if you know what you're doing, it's 24 hours. 24 hours is still minus revenue. It's very difficult to forecast when you're being constantly under attacks. And as well, the recovery or your sort of penalty, there is no risk for them. For your risk is that you're losing revenue and as well the recovery, either you do it yourself, time, you call in professional, time and money. you asking for legal help, legal fees. So if you are being attacked, you have it much, much worse. And I really thank my experience from over a decade ago before I got into SEO, which was in working with a security company where we helped people identify, let's say, open doors on their website so that they could, we were paid by people to identify open doors on their websites so they could close them, right, from a security perspective. And I really thank my experience from back then because like, What I'm seeing now is just basically the same approaches which I mean, people who exploit vulnerabilities utilize, which is probing and then probing to testing and then testing to scale. And like I said, we're in the era of now needing security on your web assets because you don't only have to protect the visitors on your website, you also have to protect your visibility on platforms which visitors utilize to make decisions such as Chargibiti, such as Google, such as Perplexity, such as Claude. If you're not doing this in this day and age, who knows? And in my closing thoughts, I would like to say SEO has changed and it's changed for now and hopefully not forever. SEOs love to build things. We love to run. We love to find new tricks and we compete between each other. Yes, we're mainly friends. outside of the terrorists. But we love it. Like, okay, I moved the position seven, now I'm position three, now I'm position one. Oh my goodness, this is amazing. This is what we like to do. Now our main job is to protect what we have already built. It's to defend our work. It's to fight terrorists. So yes, SEO has changed. I really hope it will change for the better. But for 2026, unfortunately, the predictions are very green. you