Image: Aleutie
A while back, I wrote about a kink website called “Know Your Sins” using a fake DMCA scam to get backlinks and boost their search results. The site’s owners would send out phony copyright claims, saying they owned images they neither owned nor had nothing to do with, and demanding backlinks to their site or they’d sue for copyright infringement. The site’s owners, Samuel Davis (@Samueld_KYS on Twitter) and Olivia Moore (whose Twitter profile has been deleted), engage in copyright fraud to try to boost their Google search results.
It seems fraudulent copyright scams are something of a growth industry.
About a week ago, I received this email from an outfit calling itself CopyTrack, headquartered in Germany (click to embiggen):
CopyTrack claimed I was using images belonging to their “client,” a Norwegian company owned by a Chinese conglomerate called Yay Images that appears only to license images from other stock companies, and demanding €2,168.76 (about $2,500) in “compensation.”
The images in question on my site are licensed from stock agencies (Shutterstock and Deposit Photos, the latter of which I’ve been using for many years).
A quick Google search shows that Copytrack is a scam, and the owner has been running this scam under a variety of names for years.
BlueMedia has an article about these guys, Copyright Infringement Notice Email from Copytrack: What Kind of Company Is Copytrack?
The company is organized and registered in Germany, where it has changed names multiple times. A German lawyer, Kanzlei Franz, has a lengthy article about this company’s sordid history (with a German-language version here).
I am, of course, far from the only person to be hit with this extortion scheme. You’ll find similar tales from the Brutally Honest Blog, Yvan’s Substack, Ben Tasker, molif, and tons of others; a Google search for copytrack scam produces hundreds of similar hits.
The general consensus on Copytrack is neatly summed up by this quote from Content Powered:
I think Copytrack provides a service that could, potentially, be legitimate. However, they don’t put any effort at all into verifying copyright ownership; they’re a more-or-less entirely automated platform anyone can just upload some pictures to and then send threatening letters to other people, hoping for a payout. They may not, themselves, be copyright trolls, but they facilitate copyright trolls with no mechanism to stop them.
I am fortunate in that I am represented by an outstanding intellectual property attorney, Leonard Duboff in Portland. I simply informed Copytrack that I am represented by counsel and would no longer respond directly to them, and needless to say my attorney hasn’t heard a peep from them.
When I wrote about the Know Your Sins scam, a ton of people emailed me to say they’d received similar fraudulent copyright-scam emails. I got so many that I wasn’t able to respond to all of them (but thank you, everyone who messaged me!).
That suggests the scale of copyright fraud is enormous.
If you’ve received a fraudulent email from Copytrack, I’d love to hear about it! Post a comment here, or email me.
In my opinion, Copytrack’s methods violate competition law, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and other laws. The fact that they often fail to adequately examine the evidence and license terms before contacting and accusing thousands upon thousands of people worldwide via bot spam emails is legally questionable.
This could potentially constitute “false accusation” (Section 164 of the German Criminal Code), which is deliberately calculated and sent out with the intention of generating profit (despite the intentionally vague wording in Copytrack’s emails). The underlying principle seems to be: “If only 30% of people pay out of fear, that’s enough to make a profit.”
One wonders why consumer organizations and other authorities haven’t intervened yet. It’s high time that affected consumers take stronger action against this practice. There’s already a lot of information about Copytrack online. Several lawyers have also taken a very critical look at this “company” and are trying to help those affected.
To my knowledge, consumer protection agencies and courts in Italy already banned Copytrack’s activities last year.
In Germany you are apparently guilty without any proof… As a German citizen myself, I do not agree to this Nazi way of thinking. Told them to give me proof or go pound sand. Going to put an official complaint once I find the right local body (Belgium). It is all a bot scam. No one is on the other side.