The Smith Martin Lewis Legal Services DMCA Scam | Skipblast

Image Copyright Backlink Scam: Now In Part Four!

While it seems that the shady SEO running this scam has finally taken me off their contact list, it doesn’t mean that this despicable behavior is over.

The fact of the matter is that I likely know who is doing this, because he confessed it to me while not admitting any wrong doing and instead blaming it on a hired contractor.

Yet here we are more than year later from when I was first contacted with one of these scams and that “contractor” is still at it.

And I will continue to expose the domains being used for this to both spread awareness of this scam and to attempt to burn each domain being used for this purpose.

That being said, I am aware that there is a small chance that someone else has escalated this backlink scam from coming from a photo rights agency domain to the fake law firm domains, but my research into this tells me it is very unlikely.

Either way, I will continue to expose these domains.

Smith Martin Lewis Legal Services And A DMCA Scam

The latest iteration of this scam seems to have moved on to the new fake law firm of Smith Martin Lewis Legal Services.

Here’s a screenshot from a Facebook group where a blogger shared getting this little scam email –

smith martn lews legal image copyright scam email

What I find most curious about this is the site they are trying to get backlinks for because it is not really a great site, and honestly not the type of site that I’d expect from the person that I know has been doing this.

Honestly, this is the only thing that makes me think this might not be the person that I know for a fact has been doing this.

But, he does run an agency on the side, so this could be a client site.

Again we have a freshly registered domain for the fake law firm site with it being hosting on a shared account at Namecheap Hosting.

smith martin lewis backlink scam

But I am surprised to see that we also have the site that’s benefiting from these scammed backlinks also on a shared Namecheap hosting account.

whois details

Is Smith Martin Lewis Legal Services A Real Law Firm?

No, Smith Martin Lewis Legal Services is definitely not a real law firm.

The photos of the “lawyers” seem to be fake, as expected.

And the address listed on the site goes to a co-working space.

But my favorite part of this entire update is that the guy (team?) behind this scam clearly saw my last update where I found their other fake law firm sites since they’d used the same content at the top of the page.

They changed it this time!

But…that’s all that was changed.

Mason Donald King Legal Services Is The Same Scam

Hrm, this section of the site looks familiar.

mason donald king legal services backlink scam

And hey, there is shared Namecheap hosting for this site as well.

whois

Looks like someone else discovered that this site a fake law firm last month and posted about it on the UK Business Forums website.

Mason Donald King Legal Services image copyright scam

You can click on the link above to read the entire thread and the email this guy received.

Kudos to him for sharing the email and his findings with others.

James Parker Anderson Legal Services Is The Same Scam

Yeah, this looks familiar, too.

jakes parker anderson fake law firm

Yup, newly registered in recent months and hosting on a shared Namecheap hosting account.

whois

Looks like scam emails from this fake law firm have been making the rounds as well.

Here’s someone talking about getting on back in October 2021 on the suck-o forum.

email spam for backlinks

I recommend clicking on the link above to read this entire forum thread as these people did a bit more digging into this fake law firm.

Scott Hill Young Legal Services Is The Same Scam

Hrm, where have I seen this before?

scott hill young fake law firm

Can you guess where this site is hosted and how old the domain is?

whois

Will This Ever End?

Are you as tired of seeing these updates as I am writing them?

I suspect there are other fake law firm sites like these that just didn’t come up in Google…yet.

The problem is that people are falling for this scam instead of doing their due diligence to see if this is a legit legal email or not.

Honestly, I don’t see this scam stopping until either site owners wise up to this backlink scam, or the guy (or people) behind the scam get into legal hot water for impersonating a lawyer (which is illegal) and potentially for blackmail/coercion.

Remember, backlinks have a monetary value, which makes this form of fraud.

If you feel you’ve been scammed with one of these fake law firm emails, then the relevant authorities to lodge your complaint are:

And standard internet disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

If you missed the other updates about this scam:

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35 thoughts on “Image Copyright Backlink Scam: Now In Part Four!”

  1. clever on the scammers part, and hopefully it will stop soon. i wasn’t aware of this scam and thanks for documenting it.

    Reply
  2. Hi, Thanks a lot for your post. We have the confirmation it is a scam. It seems unbelievable to us to put so much energy and trickery to get backlinks.

    Reply
  3. Thank you for writing about this. I suspected an SEO scam when this same law firm scammer contacted my family business today, with no actual proof of ownership or even where the photo is on the listed website and wanting a link within 7 days. In our case they’re claiming our blog post from 2017 has a infringing photo from this whitewater rafting online magazine that only dates back to 2020. My father was freaked out despite me telling him it’s a scam and wanted to change the photos ”just in case”, until I showed him this.

    Reply
  4. I received a similar email few days back — for a moment, I assumed one of our graphics fellas actually made a mistake, and instead of Pixabay, used some copyrighted work.

    I even went ahead and unpublished that particular blog post — ain’t gonna add link to some sub sea services website on my blog, so unpublishing was the immediate remedy.

    Something did not feel right — I have come across a few DMCAs in the past, and this one just did not sound…. “DMCA-ish” enough. 🙂

    Decided to Google, found your page — thanks for the blog post. 🙂

    Reply
  5. I’ve been getting emails from nationwide-law.org – part of the same scam. If you do a Google image search on the photos of the “lawyers”, they are AI-generated stock images of fake people!!

    Reply
  6. Hello,

    we also received an email from Kristy Barrett at Nationwide Legal in Austin. They want a backlink to a dubious ski store (cheapsnowgear. com) for a photo we got from Pixabay.

    The lawyer site looks legit at first glance. With a little research, I ended up here. This actually seems to be a big scam.

    Many greetings
    Florian

    Reply
  7. We got one from nationwide-legal.org today (9th Nov 2022) at our university site. It had the admin people doing what they asked. I was sus about the message after i was forwarded the message. did some search. ended up here. removed the links. This time the ‘client’ site is tier1furnishings. looks to be a ma and pa co making wood tables. the site has 200 odd SEO trap pages and some broken links. they probably got scammed too.

    Reply
  8. p.s. this is the text of the email to help others detect it:

    Subject: DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice

    Dear owner of https://REDACTED/REDACTED/REDACTED/,

    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.com/FDCehWu.jpg on this page
    : https://REDACTED/REDACTED/REDACTED/ is fine, as long as our
    client (Tier 1 Furnishings Ltd) is fully credited.

    The credit must appear under the image or the footer of the page and
    be clickable to https://REDACTED.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.
    REDACTED) 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

    Julia Frank
    Trademark Attorney

    Nationwide Legal
    401 Congress Ave. #1540,
    Austin, TX 78701

    julia@nationwide-legal.org
    http://www.nationwide-legal.org

    Reply
  9. I received an email very similar to the one posted by Matt (Nov 9th) claiming to come from nationwidelawservices.com claiming unauthorized use of an image along with a veiled threat that simply removing it wouldn’t change further legal action. The red flag was a requirement that a clickable link be provided from the image in question to a site selling cheap women’s hoodies.

    Incidentally, the image in question was free and came from Pixabay where no attribution is required.

    Aside from the red flag, the email looked legit. It also links to an impressive website. It’s easy to see how people get drawn in

    Reply
  10. I’ve had the same scam reach out to me, albeit from ‘Nation Legal – as another commenter (Jerry on December 7th) has mentioned, the dead giveaway that it’s really just an SEO/backlink scam is the wording around removing the offending content not being good enough. The only way to resolve, apparently, is to place a link to the claimant’s site.

    Reply
  11. Received this on 7th Februrary 2023 – Cost me a couple hours of work until I found this thread! Was thinking of actually calling the website they trying to link to see if I can get a contact for this douche bag. Let me know if you’d like me to hunt down this scammer!

    — You are receiving this legal infringement notice from Nationwide
    Legal Trademark Department due to the unauthorized usage of our client’s
    image.

    The credit must appear under the image or the footer of the page and
    be clickable to https://powershiftco.com.au 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.
    58452) 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

    Jack Moore
    Trademark Attorney

    Nationwide Legal
    401 Congress Ave. #1540,
    Austin, TX 78701

    jack@nation-legal.co
    http://www.nation-legal.co–

    Reply
    • Oh wow, looks like their emails have evolved to sound a bit more threatening than they used to be. I think that sometimes these scam emails they send out are to get links for their own websites, but others (like this one) seem to be for client sites. If you find out the name of someone doing this, feel free to circle back and share it. I know at least one person mentioned wanting to take legal action.

      Reply
  12. Got same email from “Jack” about an image I’m using from Unsplash. I wonder if they actually crawl through Unsplash images, then use Google Lens to find where the image is being used and then send threatening email to those websites.

    Reply
  13. Just got one of these from lydia@nation-law.net to keep us amused over the St Patrick’s weekend, looking for credits and backlinks for an Unsplash image.
    Thanks, everybody, for confirming the deception (though I did get a clue when the reply to ‘Lydia’ was undeliverable because the domain couldn’t be found).

    Reply

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