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Mugshots.com’s alleged owners arrested for extortion

Mugshots.com publishes people's mugshots and extorts a removal fee.
Written by
May 22, 2018
Naked Security extortion identity theft Mugshots.com unpublisharrest.com

On 2 September, 2013, a California resident, Jesse T., was arrested and booked into the Sonoma County Jail.
As is standard procedure, police took his mugshot and his fingerprints. He was released 12 days later without being charged for a crime.
Jesse T. estimates that he went on to submit 100 applications for jobs in the electrical field, construction, manufacturing, and labor. He got nary a nibble: zero response, no return calls, no acknowledging emails, no invitations to come in for an interview
A year after his arrest, a friend told him she’d searched for him online and found his mugshot. Was he in prison? Jesse T. was astonished and embarrassed. What was she talking about?
Google yourself, she said.
What he found: the arrest information had been published to a site called Mugshots.com. The site listed his full name, address, gender, and the charge for which Jesse T. had been arrested. It lacked any mention of the fact that he hadn’t been charged or convicted. Also on the site, he found a link to unpublisharrest.com. That led him to a phone number. When he called the 800 number, a man told him he’d need to fork over $399 to have his mugshot taken down.
“That’s illegal,” said Jesse T. The man laughed and hung up. Jesse T. called a total of five times, but all he got was a recording. Then, he got a call from an unlisted number. He turned on his recorder and answered.
According to court documents, this is the transcript from that call, which Jesse T. presented to police:

Jessie T.: Hello?
Unknown male: This third time tell you f**king bitch we never answer your calls again you’ve been permanently published faggot bitch.
Jessie T.: Hey, I’d like my stuff removed.
Call ended.

This is the business model: Mugshots.com publishes people’s mugshots, without their knowledge or consent, and then it extorts them for removal of the content.
But last week, Jesse T. was presented with a juicy fillet of poetic justice. Care for karma sauce?


According to a 25-page affidavit, between January 2014 and January 2017, Mugshots.com extorted at least 5,703 people throughout the US, for a total of approximately $2.5m.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced on Wednesday that two of four alleged owners and operators of Mugshots.com – Sahar Sarid and Thomas Keesee – were arrested in south Florida on a recently issued California warrant, on charges of extortion, money laundering, and identity theft.
Beyond those two alleged extortionists, the warrant also mentions Kishore Bhavnanie and David Usdan. Also on Wednesday, Bhavnanie was arraigned by a Pennsylvania state judge, with bail reportedly set at $1.86 million. Usdan is also reportedly in custody, according to Tania Mercado, a spokeswoman for the California Attorney General’s office.
According to Becerra’s press release, Mugshots.com mines data from police and sheriffs’ department websites to collect individuals’ names, booking photos and charges. It then republishes the information online without the individuals’ knowledge or consent. People who request removal go through what Jesse T. went through: they’re routed to a secondary website called Unpublisharrest.com and charged a “de-publishing” fee to have the content removed.
No payment? No dice: the criminal record information stays up until individuals shell out, regardless of the fact that, like Jesse T., some subjects have had charges dropped or were arrested due to mistaken identity or police error.
From the release:

Those subjects who cannot pay the fee may subsequently be denied housing, employment, or other opportunities because their booking photo is readily available on the internet.

The affidavit includes tales of harrowing ordeals told by other extortion victims. One woman, S. Shaw, was convicted on a drug charge and served her prison sentence. Shaw found that her mugshot was listed on Mugshots.com only when she was setting up a playdate between her daughter and a classmate. The classmate’s mom Googled Shaw, found her mugshot, and called off the get-together. My daughter’s not going to play with the daughter of a drug dealer, she said, and your daughter doesn’t even belong in the same school as mine.
When Shaw dug into Mugshots.com, she found that victims who paid the de-publishing fee found it fruitless: they found their mugshots had been published on other sites, as well.
Mugshots also allegedly tried to extort a widow of a man who went to jail for one night, wasn’t charged, and committed suicide four years later. When running an internet search on her son – who has the same name as his father – the father’s arrest record is the first hit.
That victim, Rosa S., told police that Mugshots.com tried to extort her for even more than that $399. She told police that “what Mugshots is doing is very ugly, and they are profiting from people’s pain.”
And humiliation. And lost job opportunities. And social ostracism. And lives filled with fear.
Becerra:

This pay-for-removal scheme attempts to profit off of someone else’s humiliation. 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.

Victims of Mugshots.com are being encouraged to file a police report with their local police department. Complaints can also be reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).


Images courtesy of Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office and Broward Sheriff’s Office.

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14 Comments

“… mines data from police and sheriffs’ department websites …”
That would seem to suggest that police and sheriffs’ departments are publishing mugshots and other details of innocent people on public websites. Is nobody questioning why they would do that?
I can understand that they might feel the need to warn the public about local criminals. But that shouldn’t happen until *after* the criminal has been convicted. Unless “innocent until proven guilty” is no longer at the core of the US justice system?

Well, “innocent until guilty” is clearly a bad choice of words, as it implies that everyone will be guilty eventually, but until that point they are innocent. A more reasonable choice of words might be to say “innocent unless guilty”, but that’s tautological: either you are innocent or you are guilty, so you might equally well say “guilty unless innocent” – they are semantically equivalent and say nothing about how society is expected to imply, infer and establish guilt, or how criminal investigations ought to be conducted.
So the principles of Western justice are a bit more nuanced than just “innocent until/unless guilty”. You enjoy a presumption of innocence, which means that you can’t be convicted of a crime without a fair trial, or without a case that is made beyond reasonable doubt. On the other hand, you can be sought, arrested and charged with a crime on the basis of reasonable suspicion, which is when the presumption of innocence becomes particularly important.
In other words, the sort of mugshots you might well see on wanted posters and crimewatch websites can be justified on the basis of reasonable suspicion; after that, it’s up to *everyone* (not just the justice system) to remember that any suspicion of guilt is tempered by a presumption of innocence.
In simple words: if the police department publishes a “wanted” mugshot, it’s their duty not to do so without a good reason, after which it’s your duty not to look at the picture and assume, “That guy’s a crook.”

But the mugshots mentioned in the article aren’t for people the police are looking for, they are for people that are already in custody, or have been released from custody; I can see no reason why they should be published by the police or anyone else.

That would be why I didn’t say ““innocent until guilty”; I said “innocent until *proven* guilty”.
That carries no such implication that “everyone will be guilty eventually”. Only those for whom there is sufficient evidence to prove their guilt beyond reasonable doubt will be *proven* guilty.
Until such proof is produced and tested in a court of law, the suspect is innocent. Publishing their mugshot and personal details alongside details of a crime they’re *suspected* of is not a responsible thing to do.

Well, there’s also reasonable suspicion, the doctrine that in many countries – the UK, for example – makes it an acceptable and surprisingly useful aspect of law enforcement to ask questions via crime-fighting posters, websites, TV programs and so forth, such as “do you know this person?” or “have you seen so-and-so?” If the police have credible video evidence connecting someone to the scene of a crime, for instance, and would like to speak to them to take a statement, or have sufficient cause to arrest them, why is disclosing that evidence in an unjudgmental way “not responsible”?
After all, a suspect is not innocent simply because they have not yet been proved guilty, nor even necessarily guilty if “proved” in court to be guilty. Their actual guilt or innocence is independent of whether you can prove it or not – what is important is that even if they are strongly suspected of a crime, to the point that they are publicly identified as a person of interest in an investigation, they are presumed innocent in any procedings against them.
I don’t like public mugshots in crime fighting myself, and I despise the extent of CCTV surveillance in the UK, but I accept that it would be irresponsible not to work with credible evidence such as photos, provided that the principle of reasonable suspicion is upheld.

But there’s a significant difference between putting up a poster for someone you’re looking for saying “do you know this person”, and publishing details of a person you’ve already found saying “THIS PERSON IS (suspected of being) A DRUG DEALER”.
Especially when the general public pays as much attention to the “suspected of being” part as they did to the word “if” in the title of OJ Simpson’s book.
It’s all very well saying that we the public have the duty not to jump to conclusions. But we know that’s not how it works; the public *always* jumps to conclusions. “No smoke without fire” seems to be the mantra most people live by.
Even if you have sufficient cause to arrest somebody, it’s still irresponsible to publicly announce their guilt before you’ve taken them to court and proved your case beyond reasonable doubt.

The point of the presumption of innocence is that it is a principle for all of us to know and respect. (And when the cops put up wanted posters, they invariably need to include sufficient information that they amount to accusations.)
Under your rules, you would have to make criminal court proceedings secret – after all, taking someone to court *is* an accusation, but in your world you’d only be allowed to announce that “X was on trial for Y” after the trial was finished and they’d been convicted. Trials where people were acquitted would have to be suppressed. Secret trials aren’t likely to be considered a popular or democractic thing if that’s how they all go… in the UK, for instance, AFAIK, secret trials are rather rare. You need a really good reason to suppress reporting.

they police do it because its public information., The mugshot websites simply mine their records and publish them

This, unfortunately, is old news. First reports of mugshot websites, including mugshots.com and the “reputation removal” scheme go back to sometime around 2010. Arrest records and mugshots are considered public record, which made arrest record sites legally able to publish the information. Some local LEO’s here in Florida took some steps since then by limiting what is accessible from their online database, such as only retrieving up to 30 days on the past. Law firms even joined in on the scheme, offering “reputation management/removal” services.

The core here is the concept of “Public Information”. Arrest records, etc. have generally been considered “public”, but prior to the Internet, you had to “go down to the court house” (or similar) and dig through records, often old paper ones in dusty file cabinets, to find information of this sort. Or, you had to pay someone there to do it for you. Now, all you have to do is sit at your PC and do a bit of searching. And it’s not just sites like this which are an issue. I have an unusual last name, and search my own name frequently to see what’s online about me. I’ve never been arrested, but none the less, it’s troubling to see what anyone online can find. I recently had the site “MyLife” remove my profile, which contained my name (obviously) birth date, current and previous addresses, even the year, make, model and COLOR of my CAR. All very useful info for anyone considering identity theft, or just harassment/stalking/etc. This is a sticky issue. On the one hand, no one wants to be negatively impacted by the past, let alone extorted because of something which happened years ago, or just by having their basic life details readily available to anyone. On the other hand, you can make the case that there are scenarios where individuals should have access to information of this sort for legitimate reasons. A potential marital partner, perhaps. As is so often the case in life and its complexities, there’s no easy/obvious solution.

So if they are found not guilty are all these sites going to take the mugshots down or leave them up, I am going with they will stay up.

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