I think competitors are trying to remove my links! Have you ever seen this?

[pbhatt]

Here is the email my sales rep received today (what can we do to combat this?):

From: Jaqueline carol [mailto:jaqueline-carol@hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2013 12:57 AM
To:
Subject: I NEED your help - PLEASE

Hi,

Due to the latest GoogIe update we are working on cleaning up the links to our website . There fore we would like to kindly ask you to remove our link from your page.

link details:

URL:

We believe that it would help both sides to rank up higher in Google and not get penalized during the future Google updates.
Please remove my link at the earliest and notify me about the same.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Best Regards,

Jaquelinecarol

[jesse-landry]

WOW! That's sheisty.

[Jonathan1979]

The true method of "Negative SEO".  Shady.

[JMacSupply]

Wow - I have received an email like that recently, and was surprised that the person emailing me would want to take his link down - but now it all makes sense.  It was a competitor all along!

Talk about Negative/black-hat tactics!