"Please return the links to the footer!" error

I purchased and activated my theme so I could remove the links from my theme and to modify it without problems.

Nonetheless, I suddenly receive the following error message

Please return the links to the footer!
Or purchase free links version of the theme.

and I am no longer able to access the site, nor the admin dashboard.

I tried to contact SMThemes support but I can't seem to get any response out of them. They only sent one email asking me to put the old footer.php back and then reactivate my theme.

Things is, I never changed the footer.php and even replacing it with the original version didn't do anything at all. I am still locked out of my site.

This is ridiculous. I purchased my theme so I did NOT have to put up with malarkey like this and here I am, entirely stuck with a deadline in my neck and an unresponsive support team.

Does anyone have any ideas how to get rid of this ridiculous message. Rolling back the entire theme is not an option at this point because it is too heavily modified and I am not ready to undo a week's worth of work. There has to be a way to really fix this bug.