California Attorney General Xavier Becerra charged the three co-owners of Mugshots.com, as well as their sole employee, with extortion Thursday.
The website publishes arrest records and mugshots scraped from the websites of local jails and then charges people for a “de-publishing fee” to take them down — a violation of a California law passed in 2014.
“This pay-for-removal scheme attempts to profit off of someone else’s humiliation,” Becerra said in a statement. “Those who can’t afford to pay into this scheme to have their information removed pay the price when they look for a job, housing, or try to build relationships with others. This is exploitation, plain and simple.”
The four defendants, Sahar Sarid, Kishore Vidya Bhavnanie, Thomas Keesee, and David Usdan, face charges of extortion, attempted extortion, identity theft, and money laundering. Police in South Florida arrested Keesee and Sarid on Wednesday. A judge in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, also arraigned Bhavnanie Wednesday. All three are awaiting extradition to California. Bail for Sarid and Bhavnanie has been set at $1.86 million, according to jail records and news reports.
Usdan is also in custody, a spokesperson for the California Attorney General’s Office told Ars Technica.
In a declaration filed in Los Angeles Superior Court last week, investigators accuse the defendants of using cash payments, wire transfers, burner phone and email accounts, and a web of financial services to hide their involvement with the website.
In one email exchange investigators uncovered, Keesee instructed Usdan to delete all the emails from an account he’d used for Mugshots.com business. “In both our best interests,” Keesee explained.
“Mugshots.com constitutes a business permeated with fraud,” the declaration concludes.
The most striking part of the declaration is the details of people — identified only by their first name and last initial — who found their mugshots on the site and took extraordinary steps to take them down.
Sam T. was at a networking event for his engineering college when a professor asked him about a previous arrest, for which he hadn’t been charged, in front of another professor and students. Afterward, he spent $399, a third of his money at the time, to get Mugshots.com to take his information down.
Another man with an unusual name, identified only as “K.H.,” discovered Mugshots.com was one of the top Google results for his name after his wife did a search. The man’s 2013 arrest for theft did not result in charges, but K.H. told investigators that he’d been unable to find work after applying to more than 100 jobs.
When Jesse T. called Mugshots.com for the third time to get his arrest without charges removed from the site — he was having trouble finding work and believed the site played a role — he told investigators the person on the other end of the phone called him a “faggot bitch” and said he was “permanently published.”
Rosa S.’s late husband, Tony C., had an arrest in 1998 that did not result in criminal charges. After he committed suicide in 2002, Mugshots.com refused to take his photo and arrest information down without payment. The woman told investigators that has been especially painful for her son, also named Tony C., because his dead father’s arrest record is the first record that comes up for his name online.