Although the T-mobile CSR I spoke with was sympathetic, she said that there is no known problem. She didn’t offer a credit and frankly I don’t see how one would have helped my heartbreak over the permanently-missing messages.

I asked the CSR to disable VVM; I don’t want to risk this again.

It would have been nice if there were a warning that the VVM app is prone to doing this. I would never have used it if I had known this could happen.

The bottom line is that everyone should be purchasing images and not plucking them off the internet through Google images or any other search engines image browser. By doing this, you don’t know if there is a copyright on the photo and thereby, risk a copyright infringement. Now, true people who utilize offshore companies to put together websites may be subject to the developers there who steal images and don’t have valid licenses for them. But think about it, you get what you pay for in this world and usually people who use offshore companies are looking for cheap websites and anyone who uses them from the United States should be cautious of their practices.

Business owners should be prudent in their choices of whomever they hire to design a site. Yes, they may not be aware of any copyright image laws but they should also be making sure the person they hire can do the job and is well versed on good internet practices. Would you hire an attorney and not ask questions about their education, expertise or access their knowledge? No. It should be the same when hiring a web professional. I can’t stress this enough as I’ve had many a client come to my office after being burned and ripped off from so called web developers.

Stock companies do have a TERMS OF USE on their comp images. It is there for people to read and if people take images off their site without reading that, you can’t blame the stock companies for not informing them. Perhaps Getty needs to take a more proactive roll in letting people know about copyrights on their images via a video or something. Taking images off the internet is a very common thing that almost everyone takes part in. I agree that someone needs to police this and let the public know that its NOT okay to take images off the internet.

Thanks for the comments. FYI, I got hit again for the 4th time on Saturday. I updated my blog post with the latest info.

It is highly annoying. So much for the capability to “save important voicemails”

(I bet it happens to a lot of people and they don’t think to do anything about it.)