Feds Say Jewelry Company CEO Scrubbed Google Results With Fake Court Orders And Forged Judge's Signatures

from the sign-here-to-self-destruct dept

Juicing your SEO? Don't like what turns up during vanity Googling? There are a few right ways to solve this problem and apparently about a million wrong ones.

Doing the wrong thing could easily make things worse. Bogus DMCA notices tend to result in Streisandings, which leads to even more negative comments and contents clogging up your search results. Bogus legal threats issued by stupid lawyers or using stupid, compliant lawyers' letterhead tend to have the same result.

You could get more imaginative and start filing bogus defamation lawsuits to fraudulently obtain court orders for delisting. Again, once you've been rousted, the best case scenario is some more Streisanding and negative ROI. At worst, you're looking at paying legal fees and/or possibly facing sanctions for defrauding the court.

If you want the worst results and the worst punishment, you could do what this jewelry company CEO did:

In 2011, sapphire jewelry company CEO Michael Arnstein was desperate to salvage the Google results for his company. According to a lawsuit for defamation he filed in 2011, a former contractor for the Natural Sapphire Company who was fired for selling them buggy software launched a personal crusade to destroy the Natural Sapphire Company's Google search results. The defendant never showed up in court, so in 2012, a federal judge in New York granted Arnstein a default judgment along with an injunction to de-index 54 Google results.

But more fake reviews kept popping up. So Arnstein did something extremely ill-advised. According to the feds, Arnstein rounded up the bad Google results and forged new court orders to send to Google.

Some sympathy for Arnstein is warranted. Negative reviews -- even the fake ones -- are hard to remove from the web. This isn't necessarily the fault of sites hosting them, but the actions of a few hundred aggrieved companies and individuals who have tried nearly everything (legal or illegal) to have negative content and comments removed, even if they're guilty of what's being alleged in them.

But nuking yourself from orbit is never the answer. It wasn't enough for Arnstein to have successfully (if fraudulently) cleaned up his search results. Nope. He just had to tell others. The feds collected multiple instances of Arnstein informing others how to fix their SEO problems USING THIS ONE ILLEGAL TRICK. From the complaint [PDF]:

No bullshit: if I could do it all over again I would have found another court order injunction for removal of links (probably something that can be found online pretty easily) made changes in photoshop to show the links that I wanted removed and then sent to ‘removals@google.com’ as a pdf — showing the court order docket number, the judges [sic] signature — but with the new links put in,” Arnstein wrote in a July 2014 email, according to his criminal complaint. “Google isn’t checking this stuff; that’s the bottom line b/c I spent $30,000 fuckin thousand dollars and nearly 2 fuckin years to do what legit could have been done for about 6 hours of searching and photoshop by a guy for $200., all in ONE DAY.

Here's another ill-advised Arnstein statement from Courthouse News, which first reported the indictment. It opens with an unforgettable disclaimer… and ends with a statement that might make it tough for Arnstein to find representation:

“I think you should take legal advice with a grain of salt,” he allegedly wrote on Sept. 4, 2014. “I spent 100k on lawyers to get a court order injunction to have things removed from Google and Youtube, only to photoshop the documents for future use when new things ‘popped up’ and google legal never double checked my docs for validity… I could have saved 100k and 2 years of waiting/damage if I just used photoshop and a few hours of creative editing… Lawyers are often worse than the criminals.”

Arnstein wanted to clean up bogus complaints and comments from a pissed off contractor. I guess that goal has been achieved. But those results will be replaced with his criminal indictment, fraudulent behavior, and his failure to get away with it.

Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: forged court orders, michael arnstein, search results, seo
Companies: natural sapphire company


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 21 Apr 2017 @ 9:41am

    SEO: A helluva drug.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Roger Strong (profile), 21 Apr 2017 @ 10:06am

      Re:

      I dunno...

      a former contractor for the Natural Sapphire Company who was fired for selling them buggy software launched a personal crusade to destroy the Natural Sapphire Company's Google search results.

      I might not hire that contractor as a programmer, but it's hard to argue with his SEO results.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    That Anonymous Coward (profile), 21 Apr 2017 @ 9:43am

    I wonder how his results look now...

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Roger Strong (profile), 21 Apr 2017 @ 9:50am

    But nuking yourself from orbit is never the answer.

    Traditionally you hire a reputation management firm to do it for you.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 21 Apr 2017 @ 9:57am

    I wouldn't ever condone an illegal action but if you do go that way, the cardinal rule is to never tell anyone.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    sophisticatedjanedoe (profile), 21 Apr 2017 @ 10:12am

    Judges are more equal than others I guess: forge a judge's signature -- go to jail; forge 500 declarations in bittorent cases -- "but but piracy!"

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      TechDescartes (profile), 21 Apr 2017 @ 10:36am

      Re:

      It's more likely that the feds prefer an easy case to a hard one. One fraud is easily proved: a quick search of CM/ECF shows that the document never was filed. The other requires work.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

      • icon
        orbitalinsertion (profile), 21 Apr 2017 @ 2:45pm

        Re: Re:

        The other requires work.

        Probably not a lot more work than six hours and $200, but that is both too much and too little work and expenditure for the feds.

        link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      That One Guy (profile), 21 Apr 2017 @ 11:41am

      Re:

      Of course, I mean copyright is The Most Important Thing Ever, Upon Which Society Itself Rests. No 'collateral damage' is too high when it comes to protecting that.

      /poe

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 21 Apr 2017 @ 11:39am

    Depending on who does it, the ends justifies the means.

    For this guy, it doesn't, for the government, it does.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Scote, 21 Apr 2017 @ 11:40am

    " I could have saved 100k and 2 years of waiting/damage if I just used photoshop and a few hours of creative editing…"

    And he could have saved years and millions of dollars if he just forged other people's names on checks instead of creating a whole business to earn money the sucker's way!!!

    /s

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Pixelation, 21 Apr 2017 @ 12:57pm

    Michael Arnstein is a real gem. *ducks*

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 21 Apr 2017 @ 1:22pm

    And here I thought Team Prenda was a paragon of brazen and stupid.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    TechDescartes (profile), 21 Apr 2017 @ 1:49pm

    Loyalty Program

    So does the "Sapphire Level" of Club Streisand include priority "boarding" and "in-flight" meals?

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Digitari, 21 Apr 2017 @ 2:24pm

      Re: Loyalty Program

      I hear they had an express deboarding perk as well, you don't even have to walk off.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 21 Apr 2017 @ 4:00pm

      Re: Loyalty Program

      Anagram for Mr S.D Arnstein.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Docrailgun, 21 Apr 2017 @ 8:13pm

    They're not stupid, they're just evil.
    "Bogus legal threats issued by stupid lawyers..."

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Bergman (profile), 22 Apr 2017 @ 12:16am

    Nuking

    "But nuking yourself from orbit is never the answer."

    Nonsense. It's the only way to be sure.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 22 Apr 2017 @ 8:37am

    Sad but true

    This comment got me "Lawyers are often worse than the criminals."

    This is truth to this statement, I would love to know the percentage.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 23 Apr 2017 @ 4:27pm

    Google isn... is evil.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Voxpop clothing (profile), 16 Jun 2017 @ 10:49pm

    Google Crawling

    Superb! that's true, not stable ranking in google.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.