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UK Getty Images Letter Forum / UK Newbie: A possible scam to be wary of
« on: March 17, 2012, 06:59:56 PM »
I thought it may be useful to tell you of my experience of the company I work for receiving a Getty image claim letter here in the UK.
The letter had the usual evidence, claim, settlement, threat structure in a badly constructed format. The main issue was the website domain name was ours with china at the end of it (Like www.microsoftchina.com instead of www.microsoft.com).
I checked the website and found it to be a parking website with the domain registrar. A whois on the domain name shown it registered to a Chinese company.
I phoned Getty and explained this and they said it is obviously a mistake and they cancelled their claim. I asked why is it I could spend sixty seconds to find out useful information and they didn’t, and exactly how did they come to the conclusion that they thought it was our company. They said that information is given to them from a monitoring company on who to make a claim against, and they never get to speak to this company. I guess they only looked at the domain name and regarded us as guilty.
What makes this scam more concerning (And maybe just a coincidence) is I received an email from a so called Chinese domain registrar called Yiguan Group prior to the Getty scam. They claimed that they received a request from an individual wanting to register about ten variants to our domain name. They suggested that if we wanted to protect our domain registrations, then we should register the variants with them (Obviously at a nice profit for them).
I’m not saying it is the case, but it could be that a Chinese company registers a similar domain name and put a copyright image on the website. They notify Getty of this infringement and the victim company gets a letter claim. Prior to all this, the victim company received an email mentioning an individual wanting to register variants of their domain name. Do you take up the offer of registering the domains with this company?
The letter had the usual evidence, claim, settlement, threat structure in a badly constructed format. The main issue was the website domain name was ours with china at the end of it (Like www.microsoftchina.com instead of www.microsoft.com).
I checked the website and found it to be a parking website with the domain registrar. A whois on the domain name shown it registered to a Chinese company.
I phoned Getty and explained this and they said it is obviously a mistake and they cancelled their claim. I asked why is it I could spend sixty seconds to find out useful information and they didn’t, and exactly how did they come to the conclusion that they thought it was our company. They said that information is given to them from a monitoring company on who to make a claim against, and they never get to speak to this company. I guess they only looked at the domain name and regarded us as guilty.
What makes this scam more concerning (And maybe just a coincidence) is I received an email from a so called Chinese domain registrar called Yiguan Group prior to the Getty scam. They claimed that they received a request from an individual wanting to register about ten variants to our domain name. They suggested that if we wanted to protect our domain registrations, then we should register the variants with them (Obviously at a nice profit for them).
I’m not saying it is the case, but it could be that a Chinese company registers a similar domain name and put a copyright image on the website. They notify Getty of this infringement and the victim company gets a letter claim. Prior to all this, the victim company received an email mentioning an individual wanting to register variants of their domain name. Do you take up the offer of registering the domains with this company?