If you’ve received an email from Commonwealth Legal Services about copyright infringement, don’t panic… it’s a copyright infringement scam and I’ll tell you how I know!
I had a an email on Friday night from a client, worried that they’d infringed copyright by using a certain photo on their website. They’d received an official sounding email, from a supposed legal company in Arizona, USA, who said that a particular photo on a blog post from a few months ago, was in breach of copyright and they must take action to credit this photo with a certain link, within 5 days, otherwise they’d start legal proceedings. It all sounded rather alarming and my client was understandably worried.
I actually have a maintenance contract with this client and I’m the person who uploads their blog posts and adds the photos to illustrate them. I’m very careful about where I obtain the photos and images from, only choosing photos from reputable stock libraries such as Pexels.com, Pixabay.com and Unsplash.com. (These stock libraries offer thousands of quality images which are free!) So I knew that I’d not broken copyright and that this was a scam.
However these scammers have gone to quite a lot of trouble to make it look legitimate.
Here’s what the email looked like:
Firstly I went to check whether this was a real legal firm. I went to their website and on the surface it looks real, with recent blog posts about legal matters. The address on the email matched that on the website. There were photos of their offices and there was a profile for a lawyer within the firm with the same name and who specialised in both real estate law and copyright law.
However a quick search on the State Bar of Arizona website couldn’t find any lawyer with the same name and no law firm with that name. I’ve watched enough US legal dramas to know that you can’t practice law without being registered with the State Bar!
I would normally have expected a genuine request about copyright infringement to ask for the photo in question to be taken down and removed from the website within a certain number of days. This email however, didn’t ask that, it didn’t even ask for a payment to use the photo, which you might have expected from a scammer. Instead this email asked that the photo be credited by adding a link to another website.
Warily, I decided to visit this website and my Avast Security software immediately stopped the page fully loading in my browser, citing it as a malicious advertising site. So the purpose of this scam is not to extort money but to create valuable SEO backlinks.
A further quick Google search about Commonwealth Legal Services led me to other articles from people who’ve received identical emails. They’ve investigated this firm and have discovered that the profile images of lawyers used on Commonwealth Legal Services website were either stolen or AI generated. If you look up the address of the firm on Google Street View, you see a completely different building which cannot be the one the firm says in their office and the same legal firm website has been used on other sites with just a different company name.
How to avoid falling foul of copyright infringement scams
If you’ve had one of these emails, then just delete it. There’s no need to reply to them or take any action.
- More about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
