Yesterday, while I was updating my numbers for the Leaderboards, I noticed that my star photo only received 230 views during the month of September. This is very strange since my star photo has 30+ million views in total. At first, at thought that the reason could be that another image had been selected as the cover photo. But no, a quick check showed that my image was still the first image shown for Kokkeriet (a gourmet restaurant in Copenhagen). Now this is even more strange.
Digging deeper, I suddenly noticed that while my photo was still shown as the cover photo, my name and image were no longer listed as the photographer. What?!!
This can only be explained by that a very dishonest Local Guide simply stole my image by taking a screenshot of my image, and then uploading it to the same place as if he owned my image. The level 6 Local Guide who stole my image 11 months ago even had the nerve to add this as his profile text on Google Maps:
I have asked the LG team to escalate this to the fraud team.
But I would like to take this opportunity to share what you can do to detect stolen images and what you can do when one of your images gets stolen and reuploaded to Google Maps.
I should of course have detected this much earlier. But honestly, checking that your image is the cover image should be plenty. Who checks the credit when all looks good? This dishonest guy earned 475K views that rightfully belong to me.
Could it be that he took a photo very similar to mine? No way. The people, the car reflected in the window, the size of the plants, and the processing of the image are all exactly as in my image. So I have no doubt this is a stolen copy of my image.
Here are a few steps to check and prove that an image was stolen and reuploaded it to Google Maps.
While using Maps on a computer (not the mobile app) you can perform the following test.
When you compare the two images when zoomed out all the way there are little to no difference:
If you instead view and compare the two images while zoomed in as far as possible it becomes obvious that my image has a lot more resolution than the stolen screenshot.
In the Android app, I could see that he got 475K views and he did the crime 11 months ago.
The Local Guide who stole this image from me probably used a computer and not a phone when taking the screenshot. When less sophisticated bad actors take the screenshot on his/hers mobile device the resolution will be even lower. Then the image can not even fill the screen when viewed on a desktop. The same can happen when someone wrongfully downloads images from websites and reupload them to Google Maps as their own work. So low resolution is often a good indicator of stolen content.
Lastly, I will show you the steps to ask Google’s fraud team to investigate and remove the stolen copy.
Find the stolen image on Maps, hit the 3-dot menu (top right), and select Report a problem.
(Hold on, this is a long list of steps - an please note you can only report image that are stolen from YOU).
Then you will be taken to this page:
Then you will be taken through a long list of questions. Start from the top.
Continue to select Legal Reasons.
Now you will be taken to the next form:
Getting closer to the end of this journey 
After confirming two sworn statements you get to sign and submit your claim.
This is a lot of work. But when I had to use it about a year ago, they took action within 2-3 days and removed the stolen copy.
I hope you find this helpful.
Cheers
Morten
