DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice

Good morning/day/evening WA

I had to share this one since it kinda threw me off when I first looked at it!

It just boggles my mind how sophisticated scammers are (or think they are) these days.

I received the following email yesterday:

Dear owner of (URL of one of my article with a .jpg image)
You are receiving this legal infringement notice from Nationwide
Legal Trademark Department due to the unauthorized usage of our client's
image.
The use of this image : https://i.imgur dot com/jUJDUGE.jpg on this page
: (url of my article with the imge)
is fine, as long as our client (Brian D'Cruz Hypno Plus) is fully
credited.
The credit must appear under the image or the footer of the page and
be clickable to https://www.briandcruzhypnoplus dot com/ within 5 working
days. We await your response to confirm this has been completed, removing
the image does not resolve the case.
Failure to do so in this time frame, will result in legal case (No.
32484) proceeding under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's Section 512(c)
(" DMCA") for past and or current usage.
Past usage of the image can be seen in the records on Wayback Machine
(https://web.archive.org) - a permanent public archive of the web, which
will be called upon as evidence in this case.
This email serves as the required official notice.
Regards
Alicia Weber
Trademark Attorney
Nationwide Legal
401 Congress Ave. #1540,
Austin, TX 78701
aliciaw@nationwide-law.org
www.nationwide-law.org

Well, this is a new one to me...

I assume that they expected me to call them and tell them that the image is not copyright infringement or something? Then they will probably ask for some monetary compensation of some sort...

They even have a semblance of a lawyer's website in the signature. I clicked on the link and it brought me to a somewhat believable website of a lawyer's office.

I decided to investigate just for a minute (I knew that this was a scam since all my images are Free for commercial use and I don't use any images that would compromise anything on my website) and it was easy to find that they use stock images to represent the "lawyers" of the fake firm called Nationwide Legal Services and Alicia Weber is a stock photo!

They lead to believe that the image will be used against the website's owner even if they delete the image by using the Wayback Machine!

And the supposed client (https://www.briandcruzhypnoplus.com)has an address in the UK...unless of course that website is also fake, but I did not bother finding out if it is legit or not... It took me 30 seconds to find that the lawyer represented is a stock photo.

This goes to show how far these scammers are willing to go to squeeze money out of people that are gullible to their scam. I've seen and heard all kinds of scams but they seem to get a little more sophisticated and they probably catch untrained and uninformed people.

Just a heads up 😉

Stay safe and BEWARE.

Denis