Masterfile.com Major Fraud -Dan Pollack, Steve Pigeon Extortion Masterfile.com Dan Pollack Steve Pigeon John McDonald Lev Piasecky jSusan Morissette Tomas Speight review scam fraud Toronto Ontario

Masterfile.com owned by Dan Pollack, Steve Pigeon and John McDonald is implicated in a major marketing phishing fraud that affect a lot of webmasters arround thw world. They send hundred of extortion letters to webmasters and hosting provider to force their victims to pay substantial amount for image they legitimately use on their website. The letter they send sounds legitimate.

A quick search using keywords "Masterfile SCAM" give hundreds of results with similar cases.

source: http://www.seo-mind.com/internet/masterfile-copyright-infringement-claims.html
"If you have ever used a Masterfile image on your website, and you do not have the proper license details, I would suggest you remove it immediately. MasterFile, a Canadian stock agency is on a raid to make some fast money out of innocent website owners. Masterfile has created a crawler which can match and identify site owners who have infringed copyrighted material. Once it finds out, it just creates a big Infringement Claim and asks the site owner to pay thousands of dollars. It also includes an invoice with the mail. If you have two images from MasterFile, then you can expect anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000 invoice from Masterfile. Yes, that’s how MasterFile is making fast money. Maybe they realized this way they could make more money than selling images on their website."

If you receive similar emails from Masterfile (or Dan Pollack, Steve Pigeon, John McDonald, Lev Piasecky, Susan Morissette or Tomas Speight) you may want to make further investigation before answering them or provide your CC details.