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

Back on August 2, 2011, Wired published an article discussing the mugshot industry.  From the article:

Philip Cabibi, a 31-year-old applications administrator in Utah, sat at his computer one recent Sunday evening and performed one of the compulsive rituals of the Internet Age: the ego search. He typed his name into Google to take a quick survey of how the internet sees him, like a glance in the mirror.

There were two LinkedIn hits, three White Pages listings, a post he made last year to a Meetup forum for Italian-Americans in the Salt Lake City area. Then, coming in 10th place — barely crawling onto the first page of search results — was a disturbing item.

“Philip Cabibi Mugshot,” read the title. The description was “Mug shot for Philip Cabibi booked into the Pinellas County jail.”

When he clicked through, Cabibi was greeted with his mug shot and booking information from his 2007 drunk-driving arrest in Florida. It’s an incident in Cabibi’s life that he isn’t proud of, and one that he didn’t expect to find prominently listed in his search results four years later, for all the world to see.

The website was florida.arrests.org, a privately run enterprise that siphons booking photos out of county-sheriff databases throughout the Sunshine State, and posts them where Google’s web crawlers can see them for the first time. Desperate to get off the site, Cabibi quickly found an apparent ally: RemoveSlander.com. “You are not a criminal,” the website said reassuringly. “End this humiliating ordeal … Bail out of Google. We can delete the mug-shot photo.”

Cabibi paid RemoveSlander $399 by credit card, and within a day, the site had come through. His mug shot was gone from florida.arrests.org, and his Google results were clean.

Arrests.org posts arrests from Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Alabama.  Like any number of these sites, the operator has an impressive past of his own.

Florida.arrests.org is the brainchild of a computer-savvy Florida ex-con named Rob Wiggen. The 32-year-old served three years in federal prison for participating in a small-time credit-card-skimming operation (.pdf) out of a Mexican restaurant in Tallahassee.

When he got out of jail in 2007, he was looking for more legitimate opportunities. Last year he seized on the idea of repurposing the booking photos that Florida police departments are obliged to make public under the state’s sunshine laws.

Interestingly however, the net effect of these websites has been to create a new business model.  Search engine optimization, or SEO, was originally designed to help commercial businesses rise above the noise of the Internet.  SEO companies began to use these techniques, however, to promote mugshot images in organic search results for some people.

In response, other SEO companies, such as RemoveSlander.com, began to advertise their ability to have these images removed.  For the 'low' price of $399, RemoveSlander will work to remove your image from one mugshot site.  How do they do it?

It turns out, though, removing mug shots from florida.arrest.org is not as labor-intensive or arcane a process as the reputation companies claim. The real trade secret is that Wiggen wants a small piece of the action.

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.

Wired.com tried the interface independently, and for $19.90 we removed the mugshot of a randomly chosen misdemeanor defendant, which disappeared from the site inside 10 minutes.

Wiggen said about 750 mugs have been removed from florida.arrests.org since he launched the site last year — some of them he took down himself in response to e-mail requests, but most were performed by reputation-management firms like RemoveSlander. He appears content to let those companies take the lion’s share of the mug-shot removal profits.

The bulk of florida.arrests.org’s income comes from advertising, not mug-shot removal fees, he said, declining to otherwise discuss his revenue. “I’m not getting rich,” he said.

The reputation companies, though, appear to be doing pretty well. Of the $399 that Cabibi paid to RemoveSlander, $19.90 would have wound up with the mug-shot site that exposed him in the first place, and $379.10 with the company that promised to “fight” for him. By its own count, RemoveSlander has removed more than 300 mug shots.

Wired.com asked RemoveSlander’s Jacques if it’s true he’s paying $19.90 for his $399 service. That end of the business, he said, was handled by a partner, who was not available to be interviewed. Ellis, the owner of RemoveArrest.com, would neither confirm nor deny his use of the automated takedown tool.

So, in effect, these companies have a symbiotic relationship with each other, with the ultimate goal of extorting money out of you.

There is something you can do. File an FTC complaint online and follow up with the agency by telephone (1-877-FTC-HELP). Let's get some attention on this.