Owners Of Website That Extorted People To Take Down Their Mugshots Arrested | Digg (2024)

The owners of mugshots.com — one of several websites that publish mugshots scraped from law-enforcement sites unless their subjects pay exorbitant fees to have them taken down — have been arrested on charges ofextortion, money laundering and identity theft. Sahar Sarid, Kishore Vidya Bhavnanie, Thomas Keesee and David Usdan were charged by theattorney general of California, Xavier Becerra. "Over a three-year period, the defendants extracted more than $64,000 in removal fees from approximately 175 individuals with billing addresses in California," announced Becerra's office in. "Nationally, the defendants took more than $2 million in removal fees from approximately 5,703 individuals for the same period."

The criminal charges are only the latest attempt to crack down on mugshot-publishing industry, which has proven surprisingly resilient. Here's why it's been so hard to kill this repugnant industry.

Mugshot Websites Pretend To Provide A Public Service But Make Money By Victimizing People With Mugshots

A 2013 New York Times article explains how these sites work, using the example of a man named Maxwell Birnbaum who was arrested as a college freshman on drug charges:

[T]he mug shot from his arrest is posted on a handful of for-profit Web sites, with names like Mugshots, BustedMugshots and JustMugshots. These companies routinely show up high in Google searches; a week ago, the top four results for "Maxwell Birnbaum" were mug-shot sites.

The ostensible point of these sites is to give the public a quick way to glean the unsavory history of a neighbor, a potential date or anyone else. That sounds civic-minded, until you consider one way most of these sites make money: by charging a fee to remove the image. That fee can be anywhere from $30 to $400, or even higher. Pay up, in other words, and the picture is deleted, at least from the site that was paid.

[The New York Times]

Many States Have Outlawed Or Restricted Mugshot Websites, With Mixed Results

Eighteen states have passed laws restricting mugshot websites, according to Stateline, "by banning them from charging removal fees, stemming the flow of mugshots from law enforcement agencies, or requiring that the postings be accurate." But Stateline's investigation last year found that these state laws have not effectively curbed mugshot websites' activities:

"They haven't worked," said Eumi Lee, a law professor at University of California-Hastings who has spent three years studying the effectiveness of mugshot laws for an upcoming legal review article to be published by Rutgers. "But they've had a bunch of unintended consequences."

Mugshot websites have ignored the laws or quickly figured out ways to work around them, Lee said. In places where people can no longer pay to have photos deleted, they often have no remedy to get them removed. And once law enforcement releases the photos, they have little control over where they end up.

[HuffPost]

A Class-Action Lawsuit Alleging Extortionate Practices Is Making Its Way Through Court

In 2016, two victims of mugshots.com filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the company in Illinois, one of the states that bans fees to remove online mugshot postings. One of the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Peter Gabiola, told a reporter that an incorrect listing on mugshots.com has placed him "a month away from homelessness constantly":

Gabiola, 53, who no longer lives in the Chicago area, said in a recent interview that it has been difficult for him to find a job and housing because Mugshots.com incorrectly still shows him as being on parole.

He said he just lost a job he held for four months, supervising crews that clean rail cars holding chemicals. When he was being considered for the job, he was asked whether he had ever been convicted of a felony, confirmed that he had, and still got the job, he said. His boss, however, recently Googled him and saw his inaccurate listing on Mugshots.com.

[Chicago Tribune]

Last fall, a federal judge rejected mugshots.com's request to dismiss the case on First Amendment grounds, ruling that the site's business practices violated the plaintiffs' right of publicity.

US District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman of Chicago didn't go so far as to say this vile practice amounted to extortion, as alleged. Instead, she ruled (PDF) that this likely amounted to a violation of the arrestees' right of publicity because the site was using the mug shots as actual advertisem*nts for the paid removal service.

[Ars Technica]

Google Has Adjusted Its Algorithm To Try To Deprioritize Mugshot Sites In Its Rankings, But It's Not Perfect

Back in 2013, when the New York Times' David Segal first covered mugshot sites, Google responded by changing its algorithm to deprioritize mugshot results in its search rankings. "Our team has been working for the past few months on an improvement to our algorithms to address this overall issue in a consistent way," a Google spokesperson told the Times. But more than three years later, Segal found that Google's search function was still returning mugshot listings among its first results for at least some people, suggesting that these sites were continually finding ways to game the algorithm.

There are legitimate sites that host mug shots, including those related to law enforcement, not to mention a lot of newspapers. The trick is finding a way to punish sites that charge to delete an image and then making adjustments as those sites attempt to escape whatever filter Google has devised…

[The New York Times]

Similarly,American Express, Discover, Mastercard and Paypal told the New York Times in 2013 that they were severing relationships with mugshot companies. However, there are other, shadier ways of making payments online — and people desperate to get their mugshots removed are likely to be willing to take advantage of them.

Including, perhaps, the four mugshot.com owners who were arrested today. But they can't pay us not to post Keesee and Sarid's mugshots with more than a little schadenfreude: