Brent David Willis, the former chief executive of NewAge Inc. who settled SEC fraud charges in March 2026 after fabricating military distribution deals and a CBD product line that never existed, now appears to have deployed a second act of fabrication: a fraudulent DMCA takedown campaign targeting the journalism that documented his first one.
How the Fake Takedown Works and Who Filed It
Days after I published my investigation into Willis’s SEC case, two DMCA copyright complaints arrived — one with Google, one with Cloudflare — claiming my article was a copyright violation of content published first on a Tumblr blog operating under the handle “globonews.” The Cloudflare complaint was filed under the name Jack Oram, listing a Gmail address and a Martinsburg, West Virginia address. The sender country on the Lumen Database entry is listed as Romania.
The Tumblr post did not exist before my article did. The globonews blog had no post history. The content it claimed as original was copied directly from my reporting, then backdated on Tumblr to manufacture the appearance of prior authorship. This is the standard playbook used by reputation management firms operating on behalf of executives and public figures seeking to erase inconvenient journalism. The Lumen Database, which tracks copyright takedowns globally, has documented this technique extensively. The OCCRP calls it reputation laundering: clone the article, backdate it, file the complaint, and hope Google removes the original before anyone looks closely. Tumblr’s parent company Automattic has confirmed removing multiple blogs operating this way, stating it scrutinizes notices for abuse and pushes back against fraudulent filings.
This Is Not a Gray Area. It Is a Federal Crime.
Every DMCA takedown notice is submitted under penalty of perjury. The filer is required by 17 U.S.C. § 512 to certify that the information in the notice is accurate and that they have a good faith belief the content is infringing. Submitting a backdated article as proof of prior authorship when that article was copied from my original reporting is not a good faith belief. It is a knowing material misrepresentation, which is a federal offense.
Under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f), any person who knowingly misrepresents that content is infringing is liable for all damages, costs, and attorney fees incurred by the affected publisher and the platform that processed the notice. Under 17 U.S.C. § 1204, willful criminal violations of the DMCA carry fines of up to $500,000 and imprisonment of up to five years for a first offense, rising to $1,000,000 and ten years for repeat offenses. Perjury charges under 18 U.S.C. § 1621 carry an additional five years per false statement. If a reputation management firm coordinated the filing on Willis’s behalf, both the firm and its client face exposure under federal conspiracy statutes.
Conclusion
Brent Willis spent two years fabricating military contracts, retail partnerships, and an entire CBD product line to inflate NewAge’s stock price and cash out $2 million. A federal court documented it. A $175,000 fine and a five-year ban from public companies followed. The fraudulent DMCA filed against my reporting follows the same operating logic as the boardroom fraud: manufacture a false record, submit it to a system that processes automatically, and hope no one checks. I checked. The article remains published. A counter-notice has been filed. If the party behind this complaint pursues further action, the full legal exposure outlined above applies to them.
