Cease-and-desist letters are usually useful legal tools to help combat the appropriation of intellectual property, but sometimes lawyers are a little too quick to send them out.

Take, for example, a recent C&D letter Instagram’s legal department sent to a website owner who was supposedly infringing upon the photo-sharing service’s trademark with his registration of the “slutsofinstagram.com” domain name.

You can’t blame Instagram for not wanting its mark to be associated with a website purporting to depict the “Sluts of Instagram,” but as it turns out, the offending website doesn’t have any sluts at all…

Shortly after registering the “slutsofinstagram.com” domain name, Reddit user editormatt was contacted by Edith, a member of Instagram’s legal department, with this cease-and-desist letter (redactions in original):

As we mentioned earlier, the “Sluts of Instagram” website doesn’t contain any sluts. Rather, it’s a poorly drawn cartoon about Slütsof, the princess duck of Stagrâm, likely meant to troll the folks at Instagram:

As you can imagine, editormatt (better known as Matt Unsworth, per his Imgur account) was on a mission to troll, so he quickly responded to Instagram’s C&D letter with the following sarcastic email. Holy moly!

We’re trying to look at this situation #nofilter, so we wonder if it might be some sort of elaborate hoax. After all, Unsworth uploaded these images on August 6, 2014, but didn’t post them on Reddit until three days ago. We know Instagram tries hard to be a “cool” company, but we find it hard to believe that a representative from its legal department would sign a cease-and-desist letter with only her first name.

For the IP lawyers out there, if this isn’t a hoax, we’d love to know what possible defenses exist for this use of the Instagram mark. Figure out an answer while you search for the real sluts of Instagram website.

Instagram Sent This Guy A “Cease And Desist” Letter But Got It So Wrong [BuzzFeed]

The guy who made ‘slutofinstagram.com’ was just trolling Instagram all along [Metro News]