convexity

@vegasmerch, I think this is what is going on.

The person who is hotlinking your images is using WordPress. They turned on Proton API. Somehow Jetpack is now caching your images without your permission (and they are deflecting the blame onto you).

I also have this problem on my website. I do use JetPack, but I turned off Proton. I am also having scrapers hotlink my content. I also have no interest in using Proton.

To the people at Jetpack, you really want to solve this problem. The person who owns the pictures (the intellectual property) should be the ones who control whether or not Proton is on or off (not the person who is hotlinking without permission).

Since the pictures are hosted on your website i1.wp.com, without permission, Jetpack could be liable for copyright infringement. Thus, Jetpack, I strongly urge you to have your legal counsel look at this problem because if you do not solve this problem (hosting copyrighted pictures without the copyrighter’s permission), you could be in serious trouble (i.e., someone who is hurt by copyright infringement contacts a copyright lawyer).

A good analogy is having a copyrighted movie hosted on i1.wp.com and served through Photon (I am sure the Hollywood studio would sue Jetpack big time).

Just block the referrer: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.1 under advanced blocking. I have the same referrer trying to hack my site all the time…..

I use Divi, Wordfence and WP 4.7. No problems on my site.