Background: About 6 years ago I was doing a pretty extensive job search, and was contacted back by a "recruiter" who requested my resume. I sent it in but never heard back, even when I called to follow up.
Roughly a year later, so 5 years ago, I had started and then closed a business and was job-searching again. As I googled around to see if there were any new ways to put together a professional resume, any new trends etc, I clicked a link and was slapped in the face when my OWN RESUME appeared on the site owned by "Professional Resume Writers."
Seems they place ads for employment, obtain resumes from innocent job-seeking applicants, then turn around to re-sell the stolen resumes to their "clients."
I don’t know if that’s ok or not ok in the legal sense, but I had written mine and I didn’t want them selling it.
So I contacted the business and requested that they remove my resume from their website. They ignored me, so after the third request (phone message and email), I reported them to the Better Business Bureau and other types of similar online business complaint services.
At that point, the business owners came UNGLUED and wrote several dozen pages of miscellaneous slanderous rhetoric about me which they are now broadcasting all over the Internet.
Their extensive posting of misinformation about me is pretty much evidence (to me anyway) that they were in fact guilty of stealing other people’s original work. Guess I hit a nerve.
They easily obtained my employer’s name, my home address, my phone info, and other personal data and proceeded to blast articles everywhere that I was a dishonest business person, that I was "deranged", that people should steer clear of doing business with me, etc etc etc.
This has caused so much stress for me that in addition to having to change jobs and change phone numbers, I actually was compelled to legally change my name. When you google my old name, because of the wording, the meta tags, and the search engine placement these people have utilized; it appears as though I’m untrustworthy, crazy, and even a criminal.
They even have my photo and contact information up on a website that they themselves maintain, that lists all of the slander they are posting about me.
Is there anything I can do about this? How can they be using my photo?
