I didn't say I thought it was the fault of some country or other.  I am sure that Shutterstock is aware of the differences in copyright laws in other countries, and that for some places, they face no risk of legal fallout.   I blame Shutterstock, not the other countries, for Shutterstock's taking advantage of the differences.

If you think you can report them to somebody who will do something, do so.

They wanted a mailing address, phone number and all, I just used the information from a McDonald's down the street.

You do have to have a legit email, so, rather than risk contaminating my regular email, I got a Yahoo address.

They may eventually get around to checking these things, but evidently not before submitted images go live. 

I just disabled the portfolio, I was starting to get sales. (what?)

Apparently, you can't just close a Shutterstock account, so I had to send a message to support to ask for it to be closed.  I explained the reason thoroughly.

I wasn't aware that resellers had any reason to contact contributors directly.  What did she want?

Thiefy has had a couple of rejections.  A small percentage of the uploads.

Two for "noise/grain", which is true of those images.

One for Intellectual property, which is appropriate for that image. 

Three for "Previously Submitted Content: This image has already been submitted to Shutterstock."    This is interesting.

One is in this portfolio: https://www.shutterstock.com/g/WireStock+Inc

One is in these portfolios: https://www.shutterstock.com/g/srujan+kumar   and https://www.shutterstock.com/g/Yogendra+kumar+6699

The third does not seem to actually appear on Shutterstock.  None of these are the owners of the images.

I honestly thought there was some sort of conspiracy going on.  I figured there were bribed reviewers, or some sneaky arrangements between Unsplash and Shutterstock itself.
 
Nope.  It's just that it's absurdly easy to do.

A bot can be set up to download the images, and upload them to shutterstock.   Suggested keywords are automatically added, and a five or more word title generated from the detected subject matter.   It's not even a lot of work to do it by hand.

When you download an image from Unsplash, the image title contains the name of the person who uploaded it to unsplash, and the word unsplash, for example:

joshua-earle-l6juNKOlzvs-unsplash.jpg

Even with the obvious file titles, and nonsensical keywords, the images are accepted.

I present to you, the easy peasy portfolio of Thiefy McThieferson!  (done by hand, no bot)

https://www.shutterstock.com/g/Thiefy+McThieferson

I will of course, be taking this down before anything has a chance to sell, but I thought the results of this little experiment should be shown. 

This was a fun day. 

If you think about it, agencies with millions of images already ought to have high rejection rates.  How many more pictures of flowers and pets could they possibly need? 

But, there they are, accepting random mediocre images by the hundreds of thousands...

I think they don't know what their policy should be, and each reviewer is just winging it.  Rejections depend on who you get.

Even if I no longer expect great sales from a site, I'll still keep selling there so long as they don't do anything dumb with my images. 

Sad, but that's my baseline.  If you seem honest, and protect my copyrights, I'll sell with you.  I quit a couple of agencies with good sales because of image leaks and bad business practices.

You don't have "vaccine" as a keyword.  Titles aren't keywords on Adobe. Add the words, and it will show up.

Started in 2008. 

I'm still in, but it's no longer my main thing. 

I still enjoy photography, and prefer selling through markets over direct to individuals. 

My main income now is from fabric and R-rated coloring books.

unseengallery.com

That is weird.  A quick look at their most recent images shows that their standards are very low.

Maybe they're trying to tighten up?

Nah, you just got a lazy reviewer who gets paid per image reviewed.

There is no way to stick two words together.  Even though photographers and buyers alike have been pestering Dreamstime about this for YEARS, they don't seem interested in correcting it.

So, all my images of New Mexico show up for searches for Mexico.  I have even seen some in use, labeled as being in Mexico.