Copyright Trolling/SEO Scam, Changing The Photo Credits On Wikimedia Commons

from the shakedown dept

Want to know yet another reason why the CASE Act is so dangerous? It will inspire ever more new attempts at fraud in the copyright trolling space. Giving people the ability to shake down others leads to... lots of attempts to shake down or scam others. The latest scam we've heard of comes to us from photographer Kyle Cassidy, who posted this wonderful photo of NPR host Peter Sagal running to Wikimedia Commons under a CC BY-SA 3.0 (attribution, sharealike) license:

A writer named Eric San Juan used the image, properly attributed on his blog. Last month, Eric received an email from "Aldwin Sturdivant" from a company called "Green Cap Marketing" which claims to be one of the many companies that will scan the web on behalf of photographers and shake down anyone who used those images for money. The site claims "Your Images. Your Revenue." Also, somewhat ironically, it claims: "Nothing is more frustrating than knowing your work is being stolen and used for someone else’s gain." It's ironic, because it appears that it's actually "Green Cap Marketing" that is trying to gain from pretending to hold the copyright on someone else's images. Here's the email that Sturdivant sent to San Juan:

It says:

Hi I hope you are the right person on this.,

I hope you’re doing well.

I am very pleased to see that my creative work in https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Running_Man_Kyle_Cassidy.jpg is being used on this article found on your site: .http://ericsanjuan.com/get-more-exercise-day-to-day-with-these-stunning-hacks/.

It means a lot to me that you selected my work. I prefer that you keep the image on as I can see it provides value to your followers.

Simple image credit to my site is all I ask. It motivates me to continue uploading images that contribute to informative content like yours.

Can you support my humble work? Stay safe. 🙂

Cheers,
Aldwin Sturdivant
Content Editor
Green Cap Marketing

Just looking at this should raise some alarm bells. I mean, photograph's file name actually has the name of the actual photographer, Kyle Cassidy, in the file name. San Juan originally assumed that Sturdivant was sincere, and noticed that the Wikimedia Commons page did say that he was the photographer:

But, if you look in the Wikipedia edit history, you'll see that the "photo taken by" credits have changed over time, with a bunch of name changes in the past few months:

Basically, on August 13th, someone changed the photographer to be "Natasha Spencer" of a sketchy health site I will not name. That was reverted. On August 17th, the same thing happened. It was reverted. On November 23rd, the same day "Sturdivant" emailed San Juan, it was changed again to say the photo was taken by Sturdivant, again in association with the sketchy health site.

Indeed, this appears to not be so much a copyright trolling scam, but a search engine optimization scam. "Sturdivant" and Green Cap Marketing didn't ask San Juan for payment... but to link to an affiliate site. According to San Juan:

In no time, they send a reply with the link info for me, but what he sent back was a website that had nothing to do with him or the photo, and the photo attribution they asked for was for a BUSINESS, not the photographer. It was a link affiliate site, a commercial site that earns money through clicks. What the hell?

San Juan has blacked out the URL, but I'll take a wild guess that it's likely to be the same one that "Sturdivant" and "Spencer" named when they claimed credit for the Wikimedia photos.

So what originally looked like a copyright trolling scam, may be more of an SEO scam. Either way, it's a scam.

Cassidy himself went snooping and found that there were a bunch of other files attributed to A. Sturdivant, but honestly, many of those appear to be legit, as they appear to be old documents that have some connection to an actual "Sturdivant" from very far in the past.

However, others have pointed out that this is a common problem, with people vandalizing photo credits, and that "A. Sturdivant" was a name used for this in the past as well. Some Wikipedia editors have been reporting and banning users for engaging in this kind of scam.

However, what does seem clear is that Green Cap Marketing (since the "Sturdivant" emails came from there) is not just engaged in typical copyright trolling, but has expanded its business into the truly scammy SEO game, by faking credits on photos and then asking sites to link to their affiliate fee links instead of the actual photographer's images and sites.

Filed Under: aldwin sturdivant, commons, copyright, copyright trolling, creative commons, eric san juan, kyle cassidy, links, natasha spencer, peter sagal, seo, wikimedia commons, wikipedia
Companies: green cap marketing, wikimedia

DOJ Indicts Cyprus National Who Apparently Hacked Ripoff Report And Deleted Negative Reviews

from the managing-everyone's-reputation-but-your-own dept

We've covered incidents involving Ripoff Report for several years here at Techdirt. In most of the cases that we've covered, Ripoff Report has been the target of bogus DMCA takedowns and libel lawsuits from entities who would do pretty much anything to see negative reviews disappear.

Ripoff Report has plenty of critics. The company refuses to take any review down, even if the reviewer is the one asking for it to be removed. People have accused Ripoff Report of engaging in extortionate behavior by encouraging third parties to flood complaining companies (and individuals) with negative reviews. And the site's hardline stance of review removal (it simply never happens) hasn't earned it much sympathy in other countries where Section 230 immunity and other free speech-friendly laws aren't in effect.

But the latest news involving Ripoff Report is some of the weirdest. And it comes from an unusual source: the Department of Justice. A Cyprus national with links to a California reputation management company has been extradited to the US to face criminal charges related to the malicious hacking of Ripoff Report.

The indictment alleges that on Oct. 30, 2016, [Joshua] Epifaniou obtained unauthorized access to the database of Ripoff Report (ROR), a company located in Phoenix, Arizona, through a brute force attack. A brute force attack is a trial-and-error method used to obtain information, such as a user password or personal identification number. Epifaniou allegedly used the attack to successfully override ROR’s login and password protection to access its database through an existing account for a ROR employee. On Nov. 18, 2016, Epifaniou emailed ROR’s CEO using an email address, threatening to publicly disseminate stolen ROR data unless the company paid him $90,000 within 48 hours. According to the indictment, Epifaniou emailed again the following day with a hyperlink to a video recording demonstrating Epifaniou’s unauthorized access to the ROR CEO’s account.  

This would be on top of Epifaniou's other alleged extortion schemes. He also illicitly harvested personal information from a number of other sites, including those belonging to an online game publisher, an employment service, and a sports news site run by Turner Broadcasting. Epifaniou and his conspirators emailed users of these sites, threatening them with exposing sensitive data unless a ransom was paid.

Trying to extort Ripoff Report's site owner wasn't the only thing Epifaniou did. He also leveraged his illicit access to the review site to benefit California-based SEO Company's customers, ensuring a healthy payout for himself in the process. From the indictment [PDF]:

On or about November 8, 2016, SEO Company negotiated a "reputation management service agreement," charging the client an initial $4000 for removal of a complaint from ROR.

On or about November 9, 2016, EPIFANIOU and his co-conspirator via an instant messaging service discussed their plan to remove data from the ROR website for a fee but pretend to SEO Company's clients that it was accomplished through court orders rather than computer hacking.

[...]

On or about February 13, 2017, SEO Company negotiated a "reputation management service agreement" with another client, charging an initial $4,000 for removal of a complaint from ROR.

On or about February 14, 2017, EPIFANIOU and his co-conspirator via an instant messaging service discussed the status and profits of their ROR hack, and their intent to hack-additional customer complaint and review websites (including through website vulnerabilities and stolen employee login credentials).

On or about March 3, 2017, SEO Company negotiated a "reputation management service agreement" with another client, charging an initial $4,150 for removal of two complaints from ROR.

On or about March 31, 2017, SEO Company negotiated a "reputation management service agreement" with another client, charging $11,000 for removal of two complaints from ROR.

On or about April 27, 2017, EPIFANIOU and his co-conspirator via an instant messaging service discussed another method for unauthorized access to ROR's database, "in case the original exploit gets patched so we can drag this out for another at least 6-7 months."

Between October 2016 and May 2017, EPIFANIOU and his co-conspirator removed at least 100 complaints from the ROR database, charging SEO Company's clients approximately $3,000 to $5,000 for removal of each Complaint.

And that's how you remove a negative review from Ripoff Report. All you need is a willing conspirator, admin-level access to the site itself, and the willingness to put your freedom on the line to help companies patch up their reputations. It's not a great plan, but it worked right up until it didn't. And that six-month run was enough to delete 100 negative reviews and generate at least $300,000 in payments from SEO Company customers who are now linked to illicit hacking and ransom demands. Fun stuff.

Filed Under: breach, doj, extradition, hack, joshua epifaniou, reputation management, seo
Companies: ripoff report

Other Big CJEU Case Says Google Must Put Certain Links At The Top Of Search Results

from the must-carry dept

While most of the attention today was focused on the CJEU "right to be forgotten" ruling concerning global censorship, the court actually released another ruling concerning the right to be forgotten, again around disagreement between French regulators and Google. And, as intermediary liability expert Daphne Keller notes, this ruling may turn out to be more interesting in the long run.

This case involved how Google should deal with "sensitive data," when it's a part of a RTBF request. The court does decide that a "notice and takedown" regime makes sense for such sensitive content, which is better than the possible alternative advanced by some: that the law requires Google to pro-actively stop the indexing of such sensitive information (or even to first get consent). The court points out that this wouldn't make any sense at all, given how search engines work:

In practice, it is scarcely conceivable — nor, moreover, does it appear from the documents before the Court — that the operator of a search engine will seek the express consent of data subjects before processing personal data concerning them for the purposes of his referencing activity.

But what really stands out is what appears to be a totally uncalled for random aside by the court towards the end of the ruling:

It must, however, be added that, even if the operator of a search engine were to find that that is not the case because the inclusion of the link in question is strictly necessary for reconciling the data subject’s rights to privacy and protection of personal data with the freedom of information of potentially interested internet users, the operator is in any event required, at the latest on the occasion of the request for de-referencing, to adjust the list of results in such a way that the overall picture it gives the internet user reflects the current legal position, which means in particular that links to web pages containing information on that point must appear in first place on the list.

This seems like it could be a very big deal. It's the court saying that Google is required to make sure that top search results "reflects the current legal position." In other words, if someone was exonerated after being accused of a crime, that must now be the top link. As Keller notes, this is going to have some strange consequences that probably won't be very good:

Having a court come in and tell a search engine what is "required" to be the top search result, tossed off without much detail or thought in a world where getting certain links to certain places on search engines is literally an entire industry, is going to have pretty significant consequences -- nearly all of them I can guarantee you the court did not even begin to think about.

Filed Under: cjeu, cnil, eu, links, must carry, right to be forgotten, rtbf, search engines, search results, seo
Companies: google

Investment Fund Manager Tries To Bury Past Screwups With Sketchy Libel Suit Court Order

from the hold-my-beer dept

More libel-related bullshittery happening on the internet. And, again, Eugene Volokh is on top of it. Between him, Paul Levy of Public Citizen, and Pissed Consumer, we've seen a huge amount of shady-to-completely-fraudulent behavior by lawyers and rep management firms exposed. This is more of the same, although it doesn't appear anyone in the SEO business was involved.

Jordan Wirsz is an investment manager with a problem. He's previously gotten in trouble with state regulators for running investment schemes without a license. It's not a huge problem, but it's enough to make people think twice before trusting him with their money.

Faced with state regulator decisions cluttering up his search results, Wirsz has apparently opted to make his Google searches even less flattering. He took a commenter named "Richard" to court, alleging defamation based on the contents of comments "Richard" posted to sites like RipoffReport. He won a default judgment, which conveniently contained several URLs not linked to "Richard" or the alleged libel.

The list of URLs included, in the middle, three official Arizona government documents, which of course couldn’t have been posted by any “Richard”; their author isn’t an anonymous commenter, but rather the Arizona Corporation Commission, which Wirsz did not sue. Unsurprisingly, the material in the order is based on Phillips’s application for default judgment, which said that “Defendant posted” various statements, and that “such statements and similar statements have been posted at” various links, including the azcc.gov links — even though the azcc.gov links are actually quite different criticisms of Wirsz, which are not libelous and which are unrelated to “Richard.”

And that's not all. The default judgment a judge agreed to includes other URLs not related to "Richard" and his supposed libel.

Some of the other URLs in the default judgment (and the takedown request) were Scribd.com copies of various documents in this very case, such as an earlier court order granting a preliminary injunction against “Robert,” which were uploaded to Scribd by RipOffReport… Some other URLs pointed to other Scribd documents uploaded to RipOffReport that didn’t even mention Wirsz, except that Scribd’s other-recommended-document list at the bottom of the pages mentioned one of the Wirsz orders.

Volokh wasn't able to get anyone involved to comment on the court order. Wirsz is now represented by a different lawyer -- not the Brandon Phillips who obtained the court order, nor the Brian Dziminski who served the order to Google. Obviously, Wirsz hoped Google was as inattentive as the judge signing the order, but it appears Google didn't comply with the court order's demands it delist government agency URLs.

This bogus scrubbing of search results continues, but is certainly becoming much less of a sure thing than it used to be. One rep management company engaging in fraudulent libel lawsuit tactics is paying out $70,000 and may be out even more once the US Attorney's Office is done with it. Another rep management firm is facing two legal actions over its fraud on the court for the same bogus lawsuit v. bogus defendant tactics. With Google paying more attention to incoming court orders, the law of diminishing returns has finally been enacted.

Filed Under: defamation, hiding past, jordan wirsz, reputation management, seo, takedowns
Companies: google

Company CEO Pleads Guilty After Forging Judge's Signatures On Bogus Court Orders Sent To Google

from the SEO-suicide dept

Earlier this spring, a jewelry company CEO earned himself a federal indictment for his bespoke reputation management efforts. Realizing it was extremely difficult to erase negative reviews from the net, National Sapphire Company boss Michael Arnstein took one such reviewer to court. He was awarded an injunction after the defendant no-showed, resulting in the delisting of 54 URLs.

But the negative reviews kept coming. Rather than hire a lawyer and bring more defamation suits, Arnstein opted for the initially less-costly option: mocking up delisting orders and forging a judge's signature. This apparently worked well enough Arnstein felt comfortable sharing his fraudulent tactics with others. This swaggering, inculpatory statement was included in the federal complaint.

"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".

The DOJ -- aided greatly by Arnstein generating plenty of evidence against himself -- pulled the trigger on a federal indictment. And, thanks to several other cases of rep management firms defrauding courts, Google is indeed "checking this stuff," limiting the effectiveness of impersonating judges and/or sliding bogus paperwork past them.

Arnstein has now pled guilty to a conspiracy charge, the DOJ reports.

ARNSTEIN, 40, of Kailua, Hawaii, pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to forge a judicial signature, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. The maximum potential sentence is prescribed by Congress and is provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencing of the defendant will be determined by the judge.

And one more bit of schadenfreude:

Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim said: "As he admitted today, Michael Arnstein exploited the authority of the federal judiciary in a blatantly criminal scheme. By forging court orders and the signature of a U.S. District Judge, Arnstein was able to effectively erase websites critical of Arnstein's business from its search results. Now Arnstein awaits sentencing in the same court he impersonated."

Some sympathy is warranted for those hoping to battle negative reviews. Even illegitimate negative reviews can be close to impossible to remove from the web. But if the system seems unfair, it has to be. Making it easier to remove bogus reviews would just make it easier for companies/individuals who've earned every acidic word in their negative reviews to scrub the web of bad things.

The internet may be a well-oiled hate machine, but it's also a handy source of reference for customers who want to emerge unscathed from interactions with providers of goods and services. Easy delistings would turn the web into a cheery place where every company appears to exceed expectations, even as they screw their customers over.

Filed Under: doj, fake court orders, fake lawsuits, michael arnstein, reputation management, seo
Companies: national sapphire company

Convicted Fraudster Uses DDoS Attack To Clean Up Search Results, Fails Spectacularly

from the engage-self-destruct dept

A Seattle man has found a surefire way to clean up negative search engine results: get arrested for threatening (and apparently executing) a denial-of-service attack against a legal web site for refusing to take down an unflattering link.

Federal prosecutors announced the arrest of Kamyar Jahanrakhshan, 32, on a criminal charge of extortion by threats to cause damage to Leagle.com. If convicted, he faces up to 5 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine.

A man named Andrew Rakhshan allegedly contacted the website in December 2014 and asked that a link to the offending court decision be taking down.

Then Rakhshan was done asking.

“On January 24, 2015 Rakhshan again sent an e-mail claiming that he met a group of hackers online who were willing to launch a massive cyber-attack on Leagle.com,” prosecutors said in a statement. “Rakhshan claimed that he had no other options to resolve the matter. He threatened to use these hackers to conduct a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack to force Leagle.com to comply with his demands. On January 25, 2015, a large amount of traffic targeted the IP address for Leagle.com.”

The website was unable to mitigate the attack traffic, which subsided when it removed the link.

Nice work, Andrew. Generating a federal indictment is a surefire way to ensure your vanity search results remain unmarred by "offending court decisions." But this DDoS wasn't Rakhshan's only attempt to scrub the web of negative info. Searching through the Lumen (formerly Chilling Effects) database reveals post-alleged attack efforts Rakhshan made to clean up unflattering search results.

Several takedown notices sent to Google reference a court order obtained by Rakhshan targeting three URLs set up by someone who wanted the world to know about Rakhshan's fraudulent Canadian escapades.

Rakhshan's requests demand the removal of the following URLs by Google.

http://jahanrakhshan-credit-card-embosser.blogspot.com/

http://jahanrakhshan-impersonated-police.blogspot.com/

http://jahanrakhshan-rakhshan-fraud-trial.blogspot.com/

http://rakhshan-vs-whatcom-county-washington.blogspot.com/

http://whistleblower-legislation-canada.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html

However, the court order [PDF] he cites (in increasingly angry tones) only specifies the removal of three URLs.

http://rakhshan-vs-whatcom-county-washington.blogspot.com/

http://jahanrakhshan-rakhshan-fraud-trial.blogspot.com/

The third URL refers to a Google Drive document.

The court's order says the person posting these must remove them, not Google. In fact, a handwritten note appended to the end of the approved order makes it clear Google is not responsible for the removal of the URLs.

(In case you can't see it, the handwritten note reads "Google is not a party to this lawsuit.")

The three other URLs listed in Rakhshan's takedown notices were struck from the court order before approval. That's because there was nothing even possibly libelous about the posts. All they contained were Canadian court documents pertaining to Andrew Rakhshan/Kamyar Jahanrakhshan which, no matter how unflattering, cannot possibly be considered defamatory.

Not that it seems to matter to Rakhshan. This note is appended to his September 2016 takedown request:

Next month is ONE-YEAR anniversary of when I first submitted this Complaint. I am attaching BOTH my Court Orders once again. TELL ME what is the problem or issue. I will then PRINT your comments, attach them to my sworn affidavit, and take it before the SAME Judge and wont leave his courtroom until he gives me a THIRD Order which is to your standards. Once again, the first 2 URLs above are explicitly stated in both orders. That means the Judge has found them to be unlawful, not once, but TWICE - No further explanation is therefore required. The 3rd, 4th and 5th URLs above are an exact replicate of what you removed between December to April. I could elaborate extensively if you wish, but in sum, the Defendant either accuses me of DDoS, or else being a same person as a convicted fraudster from Canada. Last week Google Security called me and asked that I stop contacting Google. I will NEVER do that until these 5 URLs are removed, even if it takes 10 ...

Strange that it mentions a DDoS. But by this point, he'd probably been hearing about the accusations for at least a year. According to the indictment, the attack took place in January 2015. Also stranger that it says the URLs claim he's the same person as a convicted fraudster from Canada. The URLs that remain live don't connect the two names. But the multiple takedown notices -- coupled with the recent indictment of Andrew Rakhshan -- seem to indicate these are both the same person.

However, both a 2011 Canadian news article about Rakhshan…

Westpac, St George Bank and Bankwest were just three banks and card issuers from around the world that gave evidence this year against Kamyar ''Andy'' Jahanrakhshan of North Vancouver.

In spending almost $C500,000 of other people's money, Jahanrakhshan used forged credit cards that carried his real name and supplied the various car dealers with his driver's licence.

He was found guilty last month of multiple counts of fraud by the Supreme Court in British Columbia.

And the DOJ's indictment…

Kamyar Jahanrakhshan, aka “Kamyar Jahan Rakhshan,” “Andy or Andrew Rakhshan,” “Andy or Andrew Kamyar,” and “Kamiar or Kamier Rakhshan,” 32, of Seattle, Washington, was arrested today on a federal criminal complaint charging him with extortion by threats to cause damage to the Dallas, Texas hosting company for Leagle.com, announced U.S. Attorney John Parker of the Northern District of Texas.

...make it explicit this is the same person, despite Rakhshan's protests to the contrary.

And it could be Rakhshan is impersonating the Canadian Broadcast Corporation as well. There are three notices purportedly from the CBC demanding takedowns of archived versions of the CBC's original story about Rakhshan's Canadian legal troubles.

So, it appears Rakhshan is -- or at least was -- engaging in a lot of questionable behavior attempting to scrub the web of mentions of his Canadian criminal past. Adding bogus DMCA takedown notices to an alleged DDoS isn't the ideal course of action one should pursue if they feel their search results are already a bit sketchy.

Filed Under: andrew rakhshan, ddos, kamyar jahanrakhshan, reputation management, search engine optimization, seo
Companies: leagle

Fake Libel Court Order Used In (Failed) Attempt To Vanish Sexual Battery Conviction

from the nonsexual-fanatasies dept

People who do not have a legal reason to have content delisted are still trying to trick Google into compliance with various illegal actions. So far, we've seen bogus lawsuits filed by fake plaintiffs against fake defendants, slid by inattentive judges to secure takedown orders. We've seen people trying to limit negative search engine results by forging judge's signatures on fake orders. We've seen people assemble fake news sites to post copies of negative content solely for the purpose of targeting the original posts with fraudulent takedown orders.

Eugene Volokh has dug up another interesting libel takedown order, supposedly issued by a Michigan federal court. It awards the plaintiff, Abraham Motamedi, $5,720 in legal fees and the delisting of sex offender registry-related URLs (only one of which isn't a top-level domain). From the order [PDF]:

IT IS FURTHER ORDERED: that to prevent further or future harm to Plaintiff’s reputation in the community and protect his employment from the dangers of labeling him as a “sex offender”, Plaintiff is awarded a permanent injunction against Defendants … compelling these Defendants to immediately remove any and all sex offender postings of Plaintiff caused by these Defendants, including but not limited to the sex offender postings presently on the following websites:

The plaintiff also is granted a permanent injunction against further posts linking him to sexual offenses.

IT IS FURTHER ORDERED: that to prevent further or future harm to Plaintiff’s reputation in the community and protect his employment from the dangers of labeling him as a “sex offender”, Plaintiff is awarded a permanent injunction against Defendants CHARLES RODERICK II, a/k/a Chuck Roderick, an individual, WEB EXPRESS, L.L.C., d/b/a “Online Detective”, an Arizona limited liability company; and, ONLINEDETECTIVE.COM, L.L.C., an Arizona Limited Liability Company compelling these Defendants to refrain from ever posting any similar sex offender posting concerning 5 Plaintiff or otherwise posting defamatory statements concerning Plaintiff on the internet.

Volokh says this was submitted to Google, despite the order naming only the sites listed above. The order doesn't discuss Section 230 once, even though it skips a set of intermediaries in its haste to get to the delisting. But that's really no surprise, considering no judge ever saw a complaint, much less signed their name to this judgment.

There is no Motamedi v. Oesterblad in the Eastern District of Michigan. The case number 2:13-cv-14541 (the number listed in the order) in that district corresponds to a completely different order. There is no Daniel Ro. Markus, the lawyer who, according to the order, was responsible for the case. The order submitted to Google was a forgery, like the ones discussed here (Lichterman and Aukerman), here (Arnstein), and here (Haas).

Nevertheless, Abraham Motamedi insists it's a real court order. Volokh spoke to Motamedi, who claimed the order was legit (despite the case being nonexistent). This isn't necessarily an indication Motamedi crafted the completely-fake court order. It could mean some shady reputation management company did it on his behalf. But considering Motamedi never expressed any hesitance about his assertions, it's safe to assume he's well aware this isn't legitimate.

Additional weirdness: the criminal conviction Motamedi is trying to make vanish was handed down in Idaho and he now apparently lives in Nevada. Where Michigan factors into all of this is a mystery, although I suppose completely fake court documents don't have to adhere to any sort of jurisdictional limits.

As more evidence of forged/fake court documents is uncovered, it's crucial that that intermediaries pay close attention to any supposed court order they receive. Failing to give these documents additional scrutiny will only encourage further abuse.

Filed Under: abraham matamedi, censorship, defamation, fake court order, free speech, reputation management, seo

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.

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

More Shady Libel Lawsuits Resulting In Dubious Delisting Court Orders Uncovered

from the self-serve-RTBF dept

Now that Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy has dipped into bogus lawsuits and DMCA notices targeting supposedly-libelous reviews and comments, he's apparently stepped up his detective work. Volokh and Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen managed to expose the person behind a series of bogus lawsuits aimed at cleaning up clients' search engine reputations. (Pissed Consumer has also uncovered some of the same tactics.)

Volokh has uncovered more questionable lawsuits, which have led to more questionable court orders being sent to Google to delist content. As Volokh points out, these lawsuits may be slightly more legitimate, but they still bypass a great deal of the adversarial process.

Here’s another twist, which some people have used to try to deindex mainstream news articles (though without any success, to my knowledge, because Google seems skeptical of these particular requests) — they (a) sue the people quoted in the articles, (b) get stipulations from the people recanting their allegations, (c) get court orders based on those recantations and then (d) try to use those court orders to deindex an entire article.

Even if it's granted that the stipulations are genuine (a possibility, but not a probability), there's still the problem of who's being cut out of the loop. While it's true the correct target for a libel lawsuit is the person making the defamatory statements, filing lawsuits in such a way that the publications themselves remain unaware of the legal proceedings can harm these new entities indirectly. When content starts vanishing from Google, news sources are left with unlisted stories based on questionable assertions. Their integrity suffers damage when they're not made aware a story's source may have lied to them.

When a plaintiff sues the source, though, gets a stipulation and submits the order to Google with a deindexing request, the plaintiff is trying to short-circuit the news organization’s review of the matter. Instead, the plaintiff wants to just get the original story hidden, with no independent evaluation of whether the story was and continues to be correct.

There's no review option and the continued publication of the story could possibly see the new organization facing a defamation lawsuit of its own. (Probably not a successful one, but one it would still be compelled to defend itself against.) Not only that, but individuals may be more susceptible to legal bullying than new agencies. This is perhaps what these plaintiffs are counting on.

Volokh covers two different cases following the same M.O. in his post. Both plaintiffs managed to obtain a stipulation from the alleged defamers and obtained court orders to delist content, despite there never being an examination as to whether the statements were truly actionable. To its credit, Google has refused to delist content based on court orders obtained this way, most likely due to the recent increase in bogus libel lawsuit activity.

As I mentioned, fortunately today Google (and other search engines to which these orders are submitted) can decline to implement such deindexing requests, taking the view that a stipulated judgment based on a source’s recanting (under legal pressure) is no reason to vanish a news story that relied on the source.

Unfortunately, Google's "opt out" may not last for long. As Volokh points out, the California Supreme Court is currently reviewing a case that could, if the lower court's decision is upheld, force Google to comply with these orders, whether or not they were obtained legitimately.

Filed Under: defamation, libel, reputation management, search listings, seo