Our standard maintenance plan includes one hour of consulting a month. In the last couple of days several maintenance clients have contacted me after receiving scary, threatening “copyright infringement” messages coming from their contact forms or other sources.

Here’s one example. Note the suspicious elements.

And here’s another, note the similar email address? Others I’ve seen are MelissaphotoXYZ@aol.com. So it’s a pattern. The email addresses may also be spoofed.

Name: Melissa
Email: Meligallery355@yahoo.com
Phone: 14161744402
Message:
Hello there!

This is Melissa and I am a qualified photographer.

I was puzzled, to put it nicely, when I came across my images at your web-site. If you use a copyrighted image without my approval, you must be aware that you could be sued by the owner.

It’s illicitly to use stolen images and it’s so filthy!

Check out this document with the links to my images you used at XXXYYYZZZ.XYZ and my earlier publications to get evidence of my copyrights.

Download it now and check this out for yourself:

https://sites.google.com/site/XXXYYYZZZ/googledrive/share/downloads/files/storage?ID=XXXYYYZZZ

If you don’t remove the images mentioned in the document above within the next several days, I’ll write a complaint on you to your hosting provider stating that my copyrights have been infringed and I am trying to protect my intellectual property.

And if it doesn’t work, you may be pretty damn sure I am going to report and sue you! And I will not bother myself to let you know of it in advance.

“It’s illicitly to use stolen images and it’s so filthy!” It’s misspellingly too! That’s actually fairly common for scammers — they’re not interested in replies from people with great English skills. Or skeptical ones. They want suckers!

Look. It really, truly, honestly is the case that you shouldn’t use other people’s images without permission on your website. And it’s true that you can be asked to take them down, and even penalized if you don’t. For that reason it’s a good idea to have some form of “receipt” for images you use — the URL you got it from, a notation that you either took the photo yourself, licensed it from a stock photo company, or with credit if you downloaded it from a free-to-use creative-commons source. You don’t have to publish the credits (though it’s always polite if you acknowledge free-to-use creators somewhere on your site.)

But it’s very nice to be able to say “oh yeah, #!%! you, I got that image legally from XYZ when someone sends you an actual legal takedown notice. Extra credit? You may be able to sue someone who sends you a false takedown notice!

Bottom line: While you might get real takedown notices if you really are using content that doesn’t belong to you, this “Melissa” character is a spammer and a scammer and you can safely ignore messages from them.

Big hats off to everyone who was smart enough to ask first before clicking that link!