How Someone Impersonated Me to Send a DMCA Notice to Reddit

On February 26, 2025, I received an email from Reddit Support with the subject “re: RE: Copyright Infringement.”

I had seen emails like this countless times before. I work as a copyright and plagiarism consultant and, on occasion, file Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices on behalf of clients. Such confirmations are not uncommon.

In this email, Reddit acknowledged the receipt of a DMCA takedown notice and said they were reviewing it. However, there was a glaring problem: I had not filed a DMCA takedown notice with Reddit recently.

Examining the report, other issues came to light. It identified me as “Jonathan Cameron Bailey” though my middle name is not Cameron. The email address was also wrong and not one I use for takedowns. I also did not recognize the alleged copyright holder.

I responded almost immediately. Within 20 minutes of receiving the email, I wrote a short reply letting them know that this was a false notice filed by an impersonator. I highlighted the many flaws in the email and requested that the notice be ignored.

I didn’t hear anything back for a month. However, on March 27, a month later, I received a notice that the link had been removed. A quick check verified this. In a word, I was shocked.

I waited a few weeks to ensure the uploader didn’t file a counternotice. On April 16, I reached out to Reddit’s press team about the issue. Now, nearly two weeks later, I haven’t heard back about the issue. The content remains offline.

To be clear this, by itself, isn’t a major issue. It’s a single link on a relatively obscure adult content subreddit (why I will not be providing the link). It likely was infringing and it’s over a year old.

But the story points to some major flaws in how Reddit handles DMCA notices. Those flaws will, most likely, leave no one happy with Reddit’s performance.

The Problem with DMCA Impersonation

DMCA impersonation is not a new problem. In June 2022, video game developer Bungie filed a $7.6 million lawsuit against an individual who allegedly sent 96 false DMCA notices.

The individual, Nicholas ‘Lord Nazo’ Minor, was upset with Bungie over a pair of legitimate copyright notices. He then used the email addresses and contact information to file dozens of false notices claiming to represent Bungie.

In June 2024, he agreed to pay $8.1 million in damages.

Despite the risks, some are still undeterred. Filing a false copyright notice is a powerful, if unethical, and illegal, way to remove undesirable content.

Typically, such efforts focus on large rightsholders or large copyright enforcement companies. As Google’s transparency report shows, some of the largest filers have submitted over one billion links. Though legitimate databases, such as Lumen, remove contact information, there are many public avenues for obtaining contact data for these companies.

So this raises a simple question: How do companies like Reddit ensure the person filing the notice is who they say they are? There are many approaches.

First, many larger filers work through back channels such as YouTube’s ContentID. A layperson won’t have access to those systems. This makes it easy to verify who sent the notice. However, this still creates a problem when dealing with new DMCA filers. They are often directed to a form, like Reddit’s, with little authentication.

Facebook, for example, recently began requiring DMCA filers to validate their email address. That small step has likely done wonders to reduce spam and false notices.

Reddit, however, seems to have no such validation. To make matters worse, their DMCA process seems to fail in just about every way imaginable.

A Massive Failure

In this case, Reddit’s DMCA process failed in just about every way that it could.

First, they didn’t validate the DMCA form in any way. Whoever filed the notice, does not have access to the email address they listed. The simple step of verifying the email would have prevented this.

However, in less than 20 minutes, I alerted Reddit that the notice was false. To be clear, I have filed notices with Reddit before, but not for some time. The contact information used in those notices was different.

This should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t. A month later, the URL came down and remains down today.

However, this raises another question: What would have happened if the notice had been real? A month is an incredibly long time to remove infringing material following a DMCA notice. Most process such requests in under 72 hours. Many times, it’s far less than that.

Reddit failed to prevent a false DMCA notice after being notified of it. However, it also failed to timely remove the allegedly infringing work. It’s a lose-lose for Reddit in every way.

Bottom Line

As I said before, this case, most likely isn’t important. It involves an older post in an adult content subreddit. It’s even likely that the video was infringing.

However, that doesn’t mean it’s acceptable for the filer to give false information. It also doesn’t mean it’s acceptable for Reddit to act on the notice after being notified of those issues.

No matter how one feels about the DMCA notice and takedown system, bad actors mustn’t be able to abuse the system.

As relatively unimportant as this case likely is, it points to a serious flaw in Reddit’s system. Reddit needs to address this issue and do so quickly.

To be clear, this isn’t the first time that I’ve been impersonated on various platforms. However, it is the first time content was removed due to such an impersonation.

This is an article I was hoping I didn’t have to write. One that I put off for weeks in hopes that I could resolve the issue quietly. However, two months after the original filing, it’s clear that’s not the case.