Nationwide Legal Services Scam

Updated: March 7, 2023
by Ray Alexander

If you have received a "DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice" from a company named "Nationwide Law/Legal Services", it's a fake company. I don't know the real person behind it, but we've got an identical notice from several different "companies" over the past years. I know what to do with it, but there may be new bloggers who received the same or similar notification and feel intimidated by it. So if you do, don't do what the email tells you! I'll explain.

Nationwide Legal Services Scam

The Fake Legal Notice

The email you have received may claim that;

  • You are using a copyrighted image on your website.
  • The image belongs to their client.
  • The client's fine with it, as long as you place a clickable link underneath the image.
  • Do not remove the image from your site now. But you must place a link within X days, otherwise, they'll take legal action against you.

So they're saying that the damage is done - you've already carelessly used a copyrighted image on your site, so removing it won't solve the issue. But instead of asking for money, they're just asking you to link back to the website they stated. It doesn't make sense, does it?

Here's a copy of the email we've received.

Nationwide Law Fake Email

It's a Fake SEO Agent

The truth is, Nationwide Legal Services is not a law company, it's a backlinking agent, promising clients higher search engine rankings in exchange for a fee. 

But what they do is threaten other website owners with fake legal action. 

This is embarrassing for the clients, too. Paying for the service, genuinely believing that whoever approached them was a legitimate SEO agency, but it turns out they're not. 

In this particular email that I received, the sender asks me to link back to motorbiketireshop.com. I've checked the site but the site owner's information is missing - it just says "The Team at Motorbike Tire Shop". So this site may not be genuine, either. Maybe the owner also owns the Nationwide Legal Services site (nationlaw.org) too. Who knows?

How They Targeted Us

So this is what they did. Their client (or themselves!) is a motorbike tire shop, so they searched for an image of a motorbike in the internet archive site, Wayback Machine and found this image used on one of our pages.

The photo does not belong to motorbiketireshop.com as the sender claims, but it's shared on a royalty-free image site, Pexels by a Dutch entrepreneur, Bas Masséus.

Pexels specifically states that "all photos (on its site) are free to use and attribution is not required."

Bas Masseus Photographer

Trademark vs. Copyright

The email says "You are receiving this legal infringement notice from Nationwide Legal Trademark Department due to the unauthorized usage of our client's image."

I think the sender gets the copyright and trademark mixed up. Copyright is to protect the original work of art, etc, whereas a trademark protects a brand identity, company name, etc. I understand that a lot of trademark attorneys deal with copyright issues. But they are two different things and, the fact that the sender emphasizes "from Trademark Department" in this particular email appears somewhat unprofessional to me.

The Fake Website

The first thing you'll notice is the "lawyers" listed on the homepage and their photos. You see they're all headshots, they all have a plain background, and they're all android-creepy? 

Fake Lawyers

That's because they're created by this particular AI face generator site, https://generated.photos/faces. 

I think generated.photos was great when it first came out because the faces "looked so real". But AI technology is moving so fast that the site has quickly become one-dimensional compared to other AI face generator apps. 

Another thing you may notice about these fake lawyers is their names. Bob Rice, Rick Moore, Lydia Houston... Scammers use fairly common English names so nobody can track them down by googling. If you were to google "Bob Rice Attorney" - there'd be a bunch of many Bob/Robert Rices, so you would give up searching.

Fake Address

The footer of the Nationwide Legal Services site says the address is 401 Congress Ave. #1540 Austin, TX 78701. Google it, and you'll find a 33-storey building "Frost Bank Tower." No such legal company is listed as a tenant in that building.

Anyway, this Nationwide Legal Services site lists 12 lawyers with face photos on the homepage. If it was a genuine law firm, Google Business Profile should be set up so it would come up at the top of Google SERP with the direction to this address when searched. But it doesn't, which proves the company is fictitious. 

What Should You Do?

So if you've received such a fake DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice like this one, what should you do?

Do nothing, don't reply. Scammers rarely stick around for long but keep disappearing and appearing using different names. You could check the image in question on your website again to make sure it's copyright free. But I'd say, ignore such emails - it's not worth your time to challenge them.

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About the Author

ASD. Recovering alcoholic. LGBTQ+ advocate. Semi-retired. 15+ years of web-designing experience. 10+ years affiliate marketing. Ex-accountant. I'm nice and real. Ask me if you need any help in starting up your home business.

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  1. Hello Ray
    I received the same kind of email, this time from the "cl-service.net" site : a site created in 2024, which has no SEO, no google my business, no lawyer referenced on google…And probably generated by AI (i didn't want to go and see for fear of getting spyware).

    The idea of sending a backlink to one of their "client" sites via a fake formal notice, shows they've got some nerve !
    More, this customer site doesn't even bear the name of a brand : it's generic ("cheap"…). I have the impression that it's the same team that's managing this whole affair.
    But I looked at the SEO of this so-called aggrieved "client": he's getting lots of backlinks from poor webmasters who accepted this fake email (they're backlinking with anchor "Image credits :…" to the site of the so-called image owner).
    Clever guys, though. I never thought it could go this far. They're totally illegal (their "clients" must even be doing trademark counterfeiting, I think).
    Thank you for your article on this subject : like others in the comments, I came across it while researching about the email I received. it helps to close the subject for good.

    Merci et très bonne continuation !

    Franck , from France

    1. Hi Franck, thanks for letting us know, actually we received that too! Yes I agree with you totally, as you say, the same people must be behind it, and they keep coming up with different names and target new website owners… Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
      Merci à vous aussi!

  2. A quick google search of this company led me here. Thanks for explaining it. Do you advise contacting the website they are getting backlinks for or just leaving it be?

    1. Hi Molly, Thanks for your comment. I did think about it (contacting the websites to warn them) but the website owner’s name was not shown, and they probably had paid the scammer (who pretended to be an SEO agent) already. I thought it might be best for them to learn their lesson on their own. But it’s up to you to decide what to do!

  3. I just received their email today and could see right on point that it was a scam trying to get free backlink. Googled it just to double check and landed here.

    Great article and great investigation.

  4. Our company is based in Germany and we got a very similar mail this night – now they use www nationwide-law(dot)cc.
    We were already a little suspicious because we do not send messages directly via the mail address used. Finding your post was more than helpful – THANKS.

  5. This saved me some concern and effort. Thanks! They are now using www nationwide-law(dot)biz

  6. Thank you for your article! We are not based in th U.S. and we received the same email as you posted. We are not familiar with DMCA so kind of terrified. Now we will just leave it alone.

    1. Hi, thanks for your comment. This proves that their intention is malicious, because nobody should make legitimate website owners “terrified” this way. But it’s good to hear that this post helped a little.

  7. I got similar messages twice now, I'm blocking their domains via mail filter now and returning them to sender as spam. The emails they sent me are a little different, but the first time around I checked the Texas bar and couldn't find their names, so I figured they couldn't be legit. This time I found your site and this just confirms my original assessment.

  8. I had the good idea to paste part of the email I received into Google, and your article came up. Thank you for detailing this one! It sure seemed like a scam, and it's nice to get confirmation by reading your post here.

  9. I received the same email and thought it looked like a scam because removing the photo wouldn't solve it. Thanks for this info.

  10. nationwidelaw .co

    This is absolutely rubbish low grade scam company. I received the DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice from this non-sense people. They do not even the capacity to scam people!! Very low quality email. Ignore them completely.

  11. Thanks for telling us about this scam. I received one of these last week and almost had to pay big bucks to an attorney to deal with it, but found someone on JustAnswer who gave me your URL to read about this, along with some other information. I originally thought it was weird that it didn't give me the option of removing the photo, so am glad I didn't do anything before talking to an attorney and reading your information.

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