How an attempt to boost SEO is being disguised as a copyright infringement case threat.
Having sent my own copyright infringement case letters to website owners using images without permission, I am familiar with the process of takedown notices and claims for unauthorised use.
Howver, on Christmas Eve 2023, I received a threatening letter from a Nationwide Legal Services in Texas that claimed I was using on of its clients’ pictures without permission. It didn’t ask for payment, which was odd, but it did threaten it would pursue legal action if I didn’t respond within five business days. It
I never use others’ images without permission so I was convinced this would be a mix-up of some sort.
The letter is from Jack Moore of Nationwide Legal, and the subject line is DCMA Copyright Infringement Notice. And to save me typing the the whole letter out, here’s a screenshot.
On the face of it, it looks mildly genuine, so I checked the image and it was sent by the local council for free use connected with a ‘bird flu’ article and no requirement for attribution, although they mentioned Pexels as the source.
Could the council have got it wrong? A quick search for the image threw up a result on Pexels where the image is provided for free use. Again no requirement for attribution, so myself and the council acting appropriately.
So back to the letter. Why employ a legal team to chase up an image and not ask for payment, only a link?
A link. Hmm. A-ha! There’s your answer.
It’s a dirty SEO scam. And it looks something like this:
The client has employed an SEO company to get them higher up the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). SEO tasks for this purpose include getting backlinks fromm authoritative sites. The legitimate, acceptable, and recommended way to do this, is to create relevant content and find relevant sites that might want to link to you, then ask.
What looks like has happened here, is they used a poor quality link to the image as veiled proof of ownership, then written to those using it, demand that rectification comes not by paying an infringement fine, but my linking back to the client. They specifically ask for the image NOT to be removed.
Neither payment nor removal would have any SEO benefit, but if they managed to get a handful of links back to the client’s site from good quality ones, they’d get a more or less instant SEO boost.
Earlier this year, someone else also wrote about receiving a notice very similar to this. Ray Alexander, writing for CybercashWorld, had almost exactly the same letter.
He did some extra research to prove the company address was fake, and came to the same conclusion.
He also pointed to a very interesting use of AI. The headshots of Nationwide’s legal team appears to be made of unreal people from a website called Generated Photos.
SEO doesn’t have a good rep. This has got to be one of the ugliest practices I have ever seen. It’s a horrible game to play with a company’s reputation. For the client, this could go seriously wrong with an automatic penalty or even a manual one.
And it’s likely that this goes on with a huge number of legitimate photos on a variety of sites.
And for good measure, I’ve used it to illustrate this page. Thank you Alexas Fotos and Pexels. And there’s many more.
Did I reply? no.