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A fun new scam is cropping up, similar to the scary sounding spam about infringing photos which phishes you for sensitive information, but this one seems a little less nefarious. Instead of looking to capture your sensitive data, “scammers” (likely more like black-hat SEOs) write to you posing as a client or “on behalf of” a client, claiming you are using one of their copyrighted photos on your website without their permission. A client recently forwarded one of these emails to us, which made us aware of the backlink scam. Here’s how the email went: Hello there, You are using…

While the internet isn’t exactly in a complete and total uproar about this like some of our previous installments of calm down, internet, many of our clients are sending us emails questioning the content of this spam — and rightfully so. In today’s “calm down, internet” we talk about a scammy piece of spam that threatens to take legal action against people for using “illustrations” or “photographs” that don’t belong to them.

Have you ever gotten a piece of mail, or an email, that looks like this?