Mugshot sites and mugshot removal sites: unholy blackmail symbiosis

Wired's David Kravets has a long look at the sleazy world of online mugshot blackmail. Rob Wiggen, a convicted fraudster, founded Florida.arrests.org when he got out of prison. It scrapes Florida's law enforcement websites and builds a Google-indexable database of mugshots of people who've been arrested, making no distinction between people who are convicted, people whose charges are dropped, people who are acquitted, and even includes children as young as 11. Each is titled with the person's name and captioned like so: "Mug shot for Philip Cabibi booked into the Pinellas County jail." These show up in Google's search-results for the named people.

Companies like RemoveSlander.com and RemoveArrest.com charge hundreds of dollars to get images removed from arrests.org (arrests.org is festooned with lucrative, automatically placed ads for RemoveArrests, thanks to Google's ad-matching algorithm). They claim to use some "proprietary" process to do this, but Kravets speculates that they're just paying $19.90 and using the poorly signposted removal service offered by arrests.org itself.

It's a nasty story about the downside of government transparency, and Steven Aftergood from the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists worries that it'll be a poster-child for attacking sunshine laws like Florida's open records system.

For $399, RemoveSlander promises to take that fight to florida.arrests.org, and force Wiggen to remove a mug shot. RemoveSlander’s owner, Tyronne Jacques — the author of How to Fight Google and Win! — said the removal fee pays for his crack legal team to deal with florida.arrests.org, and to force Google to get the URL removed from Google’s search index.
Asked how he accomplishes that, Jacques told Wired.com it was “a trade secret.” A recent press release from the company called the work “daunting.”
“It can’t happen by magic,” he said in a telephone interview. “There are legal means that we use…. There is a tremendous amount of work to get the photos down...”
Wiggen said he has provided RemoveSlander an URL for an automated takedown script on his site. A PayPal payment of just $9.95 will automatically purge a mug shot from the site. For an expedited removal from Google’s index, which Wiggen’s code performs through Google’s Webmaster tools interface, the fee is $19.90. Wiggen said other removal sites also make use of that same URL, but he declined to name them.
RemoveSlander “presses a button and makes a payment, and my website handles it automatically,” Wiggen said.

Founder Ron Wiggen does not include his own mugshot in the arrests.org database.

Mug-Shot Industry Will Dig Up Your Past, Charge You to Bury It Again

(Image: Robert Wiggen's 2005 mug shot, Leon County Sheriff's Office)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: blackmail • google • reputation economics • sleaze • transparency

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Sagodjur

“Founder Ron Wiggen does not include his own mugshot in the arrests.org database.”

Because he can now more than afford the cost of removing it from the database…
betatron

Paying this reptile to put one’s name on their name on his robots.txt doesn’t mean much. Anyone could make their own version of arrests.org, or maybe simply make lookalike / sockpuppets based on arrests.org’s robots file.

imagine: pay the ransom and find yourself on thirty more websites the next day.
Xof

Can someone explain to me what possible public purpose the release of mugshots of those not convicted of crimes can possibly serve?
- Keisar Betancourt
  
  that’s easy… blackmail.
knoxblox

Of course, the downside for me is that I seem to be guilty of many various types of domestic assault offenses as well as a few general assault offenses. The upside, though, is that my name is common enough that I appear to be the man of a thousand faces, or at minimum, a hundred.

An additional issue I can see to public shaming is the difficulty posed in trying to find work in this age of internet job application submissions. HR departments these days don’t seem to care about hearing any explanations for “apparent” bad behavior, whether the accused has been found guilty or not. They just drop you from the applicant pool with the press of a button.
waldowv

How many people pronounce URL as “earl” (as this article indicates)? Do those same people pronounce WTF as “wuhteef”?
- Keisar Betancourt
  
  for me it’s “you-are-ell” and “dou-ble-you-tee-eff”
Antinous / Moderator

So basically the credit repair industry, but with pictures.
nosehat

So his business model is blackmail, plain and simple. And it’s perfectly legal.

This cozy business model will only work as long as there’s just one main website posting the mugshots. I could register anotherfloridamugshotwebsite.com today, get my mugshots the same way this guy does, but refuse to take them down when requested by RemoveSlander. Or charge RemoveSlander $1000 per removal, instead of the $20 that this site does. This would effectively put both RemoveSlander and Florida.arrests.org out of business.
http://www.raingod.com/ angusm

Another option would be to post a whole bunch of pictures of yourself petting kittens, helping old ladies across the road, curing cancer etc etc. Then do some SEO work to ensure that those images/pages come first in Google’s search results, while that embarrassing mugshot gets driven down to page 432 of Google’s results.

This service is available from my website KittenMyMugshot.com at a special introductory price of just $250 (introductory offer includes 10 pictures with your choice of up to 5 kittens each, additional kittens are available for just $19.99).
Soliloquy

Huh. They do not include Bay county.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Kwandell-Dyer/1279248384 Kwandell Dyer

This is just like credit restoration, its crazy that this site would release the photos of the people and charge them to take it off. Its like going to the local supermarket and making a purchase then your photo is taken and put out to the public of what you bought and the location of the store. Then you have to pay them just to erase the public record of you being at the store which is absurd.
The_Tim

HAH! I was poking around on that florida.arrests.org site to see what all the fuss was about and happened on this mug shot of a “14 year old.”
http://florida.arrests.org/Arrests/Elizabeth_Schmidt_5616564/
Philipshade

I’m lucky none of my bad my mug shots aren’t in the system. I was sufficiently strange enough that the cops took them all home to show their friends. <- not kidding.
- http://tryingsense.blogspot.com/ R_Young
  
  What were you arrested for?
http://www.facebook.com/IAmPapaMike Mike Homyack

Now this is the sort of business that I’d be happy to see get hacked on a daily basis. Surely there are some LolzSec or Anon hackers out there who’d be happy to do some good by nuking these jerks?
- AirPillo
  
  If you went and asked, here’s the response you’d get.
AirPillo

I hate to be the raincloud in the room, but:
Someone actually thinks that sympathy for the rights of accused criminals will lead the public to think negatively about transparency?

Doesn’t that sound a little bit naive? People seem pretty content to simply assume that anything bad happening after an arrest is the result of being guilty.
- http://twitter.com/pettyirks Petty Irks
  
  The key word being “Accused” and not “Guilty”. This web site doesn’t make that distinction, which can have severe effects upon someone caught up in that situation.
  - Keisar Betancourt
    
    right… not including the outcome is intentional libelous even if not used for blackmail. in fact if it was NOT libelous, it wouldn’t be able to be used for blackmail anyway in many cases.
- knoxblox
  
  “Someone actually thinks that sympathy for the rights of accused
  criminals will lead the public to think negatively about transparency?”
  
  Well, it seems to be happening for a few forums posters over on the piece Cory did about the suspected cellphone thief.
  
  Of course, this makes the issue much more problematic. Is it fair to post mugshots (accused, but not guilty or innocent…yet), but not “have you seen this man/woman” images?
mikenon

In Florida, arrest records including pictures are used in print and TV broadcasts called news. florida.arrests.org is also reporting public information, albeit on a much larger scale. Should they publicize their removal tools? Absolutely. But they aren’t really the problem. They aren’t charging hundreds of dollars for an automated removal.