Investigating Image Theft
When an e-commerce store commissions a photo shoot, it usually entails expensive locations, production teams, photographers and editing costs. The resulting images then act as the visual representation of a company brand. If those images are stolen by a third party in order to represent their business, it can have a long term negative affect on the original business that created the imagery.
This is exactly what happened to a British client recently. After completing a number of photo shoots during the previous twelve months, the client stumbled upon a third party Instagram account featuring a number of stolen images claiming to be products they had for sale in their Italian store. A visit to the Italian store website showed further usage of stolen imagery. Misrepresenting the UK brand was potentially damaging, and we were asked to help remove the images as quickly as possible.
After viewing the Italian website we quickly identified a number of factors:
the email address of the Italian store - we investigated the history of this email address to determine previous activities that may shed more light on the store owner.
we analysed the stolen images, inspecting their metadata (the hidden text information contained within an image). This confirmed the images were taken from the UK client (this is usually obvious, but the metadata confirms this much more accurately).
a mobile phone number. Analysis of this number showed that the network provider was indeed Italian, further confirming the owner lived in Italy - and more importantly, the EU. Knowing they had an EU business, we could determine their IVA tax number (similar to VAT), and from that information we could find the name and address of the store owner. The store owner had registered for IVA using their home address, as opposed to business address. Therefore, we now knew both their work address and home address - alongside a registered name of the woman who owned the store. Looking on a map revealed both addresses were just a few minutes walk from each other.
an analysis of the store domain name (e.g. naughty-italianstore.com) revealed the website hosting provider and the server - where the website is physically located. Using this information allowed us to help our client file a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notice against the Italian hosting company. Most hosting companies are very familiar with this notification that a breach of copyright has taken place on one of their client accounts, and will remove the images promptly.
we also contacted the website owner via email instructing them to remove images immediately.
Instagram were contacted to identify the images being used to misrepresent an Italian company. They removed the images within a day.
Within five hours, all images on the website were removed, and after one day, all Instagram images were similarly removed. We checked archived copies of the Italian website (dating back over twelve months) and could confirm that this was the first time stolen images had been used on the site.
So, after a very rapid investigation, normality was restored and the client suffered minimal disruption to their brand.