The Haggler: Mug-Shot Websites, Retreating or Adapting

In this episode, a pair of updates.

The first is about a company called CreditCardMachineRentals.com, which acknowledged owing $6,600 to a charity for charging it excessive late fees, as described here two weeks ago. When the Haggler contacted Jeremy Roberts, who owns the company, he first said he’d already sent the refund. Then he got in touch with his bank and reported that no, he had not. Then he went silent and the website to his company went dark. Or rather, it went from a viable e-commerce site to one with a lot of white space and nothing but an image of a red lock and the words “The website you are looking for has been closed.”

Between his sudden silence, and his flatlined website, you got the impression the man had vanished. Wrong. A rep from the charity, Smart From the Start, emailed the Haggler soon after the column’s publication to say that a check from Mr. Roberts had arrived. It has since been cashed.

Why, you may wonder, would Mr. Roberts not convey this rather important and flattering morsel of news to the Haggler, before the column ran? Reader, you ask a fine question. One that the Haggler posed to Mr. Roberts last week, via text. To which he did not reply. Not a peep. His website, meanwhile, is back up and running.

The world is a mysterious place.

But enough of that. Let’s turn now to mug shots. Readers of this section may recall that the Haggler’s duller, windier alter ego wrote in early October about websites that publish mug shots and then charge arrestees to purge the images. Many of the people whose pictures fill the sites were found not guilty, or the charges against them were dropped. But those images linger, often on multiple mug-shot sites — there are dozens of them, with names like JustMugShots.com — unless a person forks over the roughly $300 to $400 that each site demands to remove them.

During the reporting for that article, MasterCard, American Express, Discover and PayPal announced that they would sever ties to mug-shot sites, while Visa said it would ask merchant banks to investigate whether the sites are illegal.

And a Google rep said it would change its algorithm in ways that demoted the sites in search results.

Kind of a double-whammy for mug-shot site owners, it seems. They suddenly faced serious hurdles in getting paid. And who would pay if mug-shot sites didn’t turn up high in Google search results?

The Haggler was curious about what happened since the article was published.

Quite a lot, it turns out. At least one of the larger sites, Mugshotsonline.com, seems to have abandoned the basics of its business model. Click on a mug shot there and you now get a pop-up that reads, in part: “Effective immediately, we will no longer be accepting payment for any record removal. Please check back with us in the next few weeks for further information and removal instructions for expunged, sealed or deceased cases.”

How come? A rep from Citizens Information Associates, which owns Mugshotsonline.com, emailed a news release dated Oct. 30 that included this line: “The change in policy will reflect the new realities of the regulatory and merchant processing environment.”

The owner of JustMugshots.com, Arthur D’Antonio III, was somewhat more expansive. His site apparently is back in the deletion business because it found a way to process credit card transactions,  with options to use Visa and Discover posted on the site. How did Mr. D’Antonio manage that?

“I’d rather not go into it,” he said.

Discover said that the site was simply using its logo and that transactions could not actually be processed using its card. Visa, on the other hand, pointed to its statement that said merchant banks would examine their relationships with mug-shot websites and take action only if the companies  were breaking laws or violating terms of their contracts. The sites appear to be legal, so Visa has allowed those banks to continue to do business with them.

The Google algorithm change seems to have had a more sustained impact.

“Searches where you’d have found us on the first page, we’re now on Page 5,” Mr. D’Antonio continued. “And there is very little we can do about that.”

Another large site, mugshots.com, was angry enough about the algorithm change that it posted a 4,500-word rant on its blog, asserting that Google had imperiled Americans who no longer have a quick, simple way to determine if someone is dangerous. This would make more sense if the company were vigilant about deleting the records of people who are never charged or who are found innocent.

It is hard to know who owns mugshots.com, or where it’s based. (There is a Nevis, West Indies, address on the site, for what that is worth.) A few days after the article, a man named Marc Gary Epstein filed an application on behalf of a company called Unpublish — which handles deletion transactions for mugshots.com — with the Florida Department of State to register as a foreign company. Attempts to reach Mr. Epstein were not successful.

The Haggler is here for you, Mr. Epstein, if you’d like to talk.

One other development: Scott A. Ciolek, the Toledo lawyer who has filed a class-action lawsuit against several mug-shot websites, received a death threat last week, via email. “I hope you got good funeral arrangements” was one of the few printable lines from this message. For good measure, the anonymous menacer posted on what is putatively a consumer complaint aggregator two vicious reviews of Mr. Ciolek’s work as a lawyer — reviews that leveled accusations of racism, alcoholism and a few other isms. The site charges $499 to delete such posts.

“I spoke to federal marshals about this yesterday,” Mr. Ciolek said on Tuesday, referring to the death threat. As for those nasty posts, he added, “I’m now dealing with the same issues that all these people with posted mug shots have been dealing with for years.”

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