Fake Nintendo Lawyer Intimidates Bloggers Playing Games on Camera – YouTube Can’t Stop Him

YouTubers posting playthroughs of Nintendo games are facing a wave of fake copyright complaints. A scammer posing as a Nintendo lawyer is demanding the removal of let’s plays under threat of legal action. YouTube fails to protect its users.

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At the end of September, popular YouTube blogger Dominik Neumayer received an unpleasant letter. His 17-year-old channel with more than 1.5 million subscribers was in danger of being deleted due to several videos. As The Verge explains, the reason was complaints of copyright infringement allegedly filed on behalf of Nintendo.

According to Domtendo himself, the situation immediately seemed strange to him. The content that sparked the complaints was part of the popular Let’s Play genre, in which bloggers play games on camera. Nintendo, while known for its strong stance on intellectual property protection, generally does not take issue with such content, as it serves as free advertising for the games. However, YouTube still removed the video, citing a request submitted allegedly by a Nintendo lawyer, a certain Tatsumi Masaaki.

However, Domtendo noticed one suspicious thing: the request came from Masaaki’s personal address in the protonmail.com domain, and not from the official Nintendo domain. However, this did not stop YouTube from treating the complaint as legitimate. And such cases are not uncommon. According to the platform itself, more than 6% of all content removal requests submitted through YouTube’s public form are allegedly false.

Each time the fake lawyer insisted on removing more and more videos that allegedly violated Nintendo’s copyright. However, the threats became increasingly absurd. Thus, one of the letters stated that Nintendo had already received Domtendo’s personal data through the company’s German office, and another stated an immediate ban on the use of any Nintendo-related content.

Domtendo began to suspect that a scammer, rather than a Nintendo employee, might be behind the harassment. However, he did not want to risk the channel, so he deleted part of the video and contacted the company directly to confirm the authenticity of the complaints. On October 10, Nintendo responded to Domtendo, stating that the address provided in the protonmail.com domain did not belong to the company, and the requests did not comply with their standard copyright practices. Nintendo also announced an investigation into this situation.

However, the “lawyer” continued to pursue the blogger, and his last letter was, oddly enough, sent from the official Nintendo address – nintendo.co.jp. But after checking the message headers, Domtendo found out that the address was spoofed using an online tool, which finally confirmed the falsehood of the claims.

Domtendo and other affected bloggers are outraged by YouTube’s copyright protection system. According to them, the platform too easily accepts requests to remove content without even checking their authenticity. While the DMCA copyright system makes platforms responsible for quickly removing content to avoid lawsuits, it creates incentives for YouTube to act in the interests of copyright holders rather than content creators. “Almost anyone can hit any YouTube channel and it will cause almost no problem. This is crazy,” Domtendo said.

In turn, YouTube confirmed that Masaaki’s requests were false, but did not explain why the platform initially accepted them without any verification. Company spokesman Jack Malone declined to answer questions about whether the platform had accepted other fake requests from the same person and what measures it would take to protect bloggers in the future.