fraudulent(?) Youtube copyright claims

anyone got one of those?

I use raw footage from pexels.com which is free to use.
Now two different entities claim automated copyright for snippets in my videos.

The snippets have been time streched and altered significantly, and in one case the snippet occurs twice, with one instance reversed. Interestingly its the reversed snippet that is claimed, which makes it even more unlikely to be a legit claim.

How to deal with that, dispute or ignore? Its not a "copyright strike", I can still use the footage, they just want a share in case the video is monetized ( which it isnt ).
I disputed the claim though, and I think its fraud.
I would like to avoid this in the future.
What do you think.

update:
one of the copyright claims has already been "released" in response to my dispute.
(what a wording).

So it was clearly a fraud. I am usually not that type of person but I would like to take further legal action against them. Cause this seems organized crime to me.
Not sure what to do.

It's unfortunately a very common occurrence these days thanks to the way contentID is implemented. Someone obtains a legitimate license to use a sample (or video snippet etc), be it paid for (e.g. Splice) or free license from the many free services out there. They create a track and it gets released. It then gets added to the content ID database, either directly by the artist or one of their representatives (e.g. label).

The problem is that these samples are licensed 'non-exclusively', so hundreds or thousands of people have downloaded them and are using them in their tracks. Strictly speaking no one in this situation should be registering their tracks with content ID as they are using non-exclusive samples within them. But when someone does, they effectively 'claim' ownership of that (non exclusive) melodic sample within the contentID system.

At this point it's probably all automated. So when you upload your track containing the same sample it gets flagged by content ID. Some of the artists will 'allow' you to use it as long as they claim the monetization, others will not allow use and you'll end up with a potential copyright strike.

So the initial claiming of ownership is almost certainly breaking their licence agreement with whichever service they obtained the sample from, so they should probably forfeit the rights to use the license, but I doubt pexels have the time, money nor inclination to pursue that beyond perhaps a 'stern' email to the artist.

There is of course no comeback from youtube, they don't care. And when the other artist continues to claim ownership and tries to monitize or force a takedown of your track, that is potentially fraudulent, although likely the label is completely unaware that the artist is using non-exclusive samples, so they probably feel it's a legitimate claim against you.

Not really sure what an independent artist can do unless you are willing to pursue this through the courts.

Of course the other possibility is that some people are abusing the system by creating any old content using free video/samples, uploading and registering with content ID and effectively 'locking' use of those videos/samples. They could be doing this with 1000s of these videos and using it to generate $$$ by monetizing your content. I'm not sure if this is a known thing 'yet', but it seems inevitable. Not sure how easy it is to get access to contentID registration unless you are a legit label, but no doubt there are ways around this for those with enough persistence.

makes sense.
what I found suspicious is that the video snippets had also been altered significantly, to the point
where it seems technically difficult to match to the raw footage,
and it seems a bit unlikely that the reversed snippet is being identified while the orginal direction is not.
At any rate its a nuisance.