My wife was frantic the other day - she typed her name in Google and saw that one of the top 5 results was from a site, http://court-record-management.com. I'm not going to put the exact link to her page, but it was for a normal parking ticket even though the site seemed to make it look like it was a criminal offense. Then the site has a PayPal link where someone can pay $30 to have their record removed. (Note that the person running the site has several other similar scams going on such as mugshot-catalog.com)
The site has a disclaimer where it seems to believe that this action is legal because the records are public. I know this is false. These records when on state and county websites always take provisions to make sure they're public but not indexed by search engines (using meta tags in the html source or a norobots file). In addition, government websites always make it very clear that parking tickets are minor infractions (the state site says on it "this is not a criminal offense"). Furthermore, I'm a web developer and after examining the html on the pages it's extremely clear that the site is designed with search engine optimization in mind. The creator wants people searching for these names to see their records to try and get people to pay the $30.
By taking these court records out of that non-search engine indexed space, moving them into Google, making an effort to give the pages a high rank, and asking for money to remove the records this is clear extortion according to any extortion law. For instance, I live in Wisconsin. The law here states:
943.31 Threats to communicate derogatory information. Whoever threatens to communicate to anyone information, whether true or false, which would injure the reputation of the threatened person or another unless the threatened person transfers property to a person known not to be entitled to it is guilty of a Class I felony.
There is no distinction in the law between public and private information - only communicating information and asking for money. Which is exactly what's going on here.
I can't even imagine how much money this guy is making anonymously and illegaly through PayPal. It's disgusting. I checked the whois info on the site and the registrar, rebel.com is providing anonymity to the person operating it. I contacted the registrar to ask them to cancel their anonymizer service for the site and they said they wouldn't do so without a legal order (although I tend to believe that by protecting someone who's engaging in illegal activity, they're not immune to legal action themselves because of their own policy). So that settled it for me. I will start a legal case and I asked my wife to absolutely not pay the $30 out of prinicple. Or the $50 they're asking to remove the record from the website and Google (which I don't even see how they could do). The site has to be shut down.
I've already contacted a few lawyers, but I know legal action will take time. In the meantime, I'm hoping PayPal will see what's going on and stop enabling this person. How can I report this to the right people there?
