How The Internet Turns Your Mugshot Into A Creepy Business - Cracked Explains

[Music] hello I'm Daniel Bryan the creative director of video would crack calm author of books and guy who so far hasn't been convicted of any crime though not for lack of trying if you're an adult American there's a 33% chance that you've been arrested and if you've been arrested in the past decade someone official likely took your picture it's this cute thing we do and if that happened to you there's a good chance that that picture your mug shot is currently on display in the virtual rogues gallery we call the Internet [Music] police stations take pictures of people who get arrested that's true the internet exists and is terrible and that's also true the combination of these three truths bring us to the terrible present with mug shot websites mug shot websites scrape police and sheriff databases and republish all their booking photos it's kind of a cottage industry that's popped up thanks for cheap domain registration and liberal state sunshine laws laws of each state that governs public access to government records if you've got decent coding skills and a tolerance for ethical gray areas you too can throw together a website that aggregates snapshots of humiliation the site owners justify all this by citing public safety claiming that by publishing booking photos they're ensuring greater transparency with law enforcement and somehow providing criminal justice through synergy or as Arthur Dantonio the third owner of just Mochis comprar - a Southern California radio host star value really is for the greater public to be able to access this stuff but much of what we have on our site you'd actually have to go to the courthouse and request the information in person and so that that's kind of the value proposition that we feel we provide yeah value do we have a clip we have a clip of that greater public value that's been provided ah there it is the Internet was a mistake anyway any alleged benefit that we as a society could get from the free publication of mug shot photos is far outweighed by the sheer amount of damage they do even if your charges were dropped a single photo of your arrest has the power to destroy relationships goodwill with your landlord and job prospects well with one notable exception but booking photos don't tell the whole story one thing Clairol error leads to wrongful arrests all the time or consider the 1.2 million people arrested on drug charges each year on the strength of cheap field tests that have been shown to give false positives up to a third of the time and then charges just get dismissed not every arrest leads to conviction and having a mug shot doesn't make a person a monster you and I know that right now but you and I knowing that doesn't change the internet and doesn't change the fact that an easily google mug shot is an easily google-able mug shot and if someone says my name is X and I'd like a job or a loan you will be suspicious if you Google X and immediately see a mug shot being arrested at all care is the kind of stigma that drives down income level and adds another barrier to home ownership if you've yet to finish college or even high school when you get booked your chance of doing so suddenly takes a dot mugshots lack context take will a mug shot having person we actually talked to he was arrested five times in a two year period each time while in the throes of a mental health crisis I was only vaguely aware that I was being arrested the first thing that I thought of when I arrived with the channel was without a time machine I just remember I endured an enormous ordeal I remember going to jail and having the people in the jail say you again because I've been arrested about four times in a week he's doing well ma'am his charges were all eventually dismissed and I Daniel O'Brien would trust him to watch my beloved dog just try telling that to the Internet in total 30 different mug shot websites displayed his booking photos 74 times not a single one of those websites mentioned that his charges had been dropped why because public humiliation is a cash cow of the 30 websites where will found his mugshot for charge removal fees in excess of $100 per mugshot one charge a jaw-dropping $399 for single removal because I guess they thought a clean 400 would have been outrageous and there were other sites and services that charge different rates now I would never be so cruel as to force anyone to do research or math so I've done it for you in total if will going to scrape every instance of his mugshot from the internet and decided to pay up at all the websites that required it he would have been out one thousand three hundred and ninety three dollars I don't want to repeat myself too much here but that's one thousand three hundred ninety three dollars that someone who hasn't been convicted of a single crime would have to pay to get their booking photo removed from the internet a person in the middle of a mental health crisis who was trying to have the pictures removed because its existence was hurting their ability to get a job and if will did decide to throw money at the problem he most likely would have had to do it through Bitcoin or another alternative method after the New York Times reach out to payment processors like PayPal Visa discover and American Express asking about the complicity in what is essentially extortion all those companies agreed to drop mug shot websites as clients on ethical grounds if you pay me I will do the right thing ethically let that sink in firmly but will decided not to pay he decided to tackle the problem on his own because he's lucky to live in one of the twelve states with some kind of mugshot related law on the books and it's gone well kind of under Oregon law mug hunt websites are required to remove your booking photo at your request if you can prove your charges have been dismissed and they have to do it within 30 days for free but as mug shot berry of pdx mug shots calm was only too happy to point out that only works on websites that charge full removal or rather that blatantly charge for a movie turns out there's more than one way to turn other people's arrests into profit there's advertising which is PDX mug shot scheme could have a fallback revenue model when your customer base tends to be short on cash because their arrest details are so public that it's hard for them to find decent jobs twelve of the sites that ran wills mug shot offered to sell his background report to him or anyone else who was interested one site bizarrely offered to sell his original mug shots at a dollar ninety-nine a pop for like scrap booking I guess after two months will was able to get some of his mug shots removed from 21 different web sites that's two months once again but nine sites still haven't budged one site has yet to respond in any way you're a normal human so I know what you're thinking you're thinking if he did nothing wrong and the law exists everything should be fine well why don't we take a big breath together with the law on his side we'll can resubmit all his requests via certified mail wait 30 days make a list of all those who didn't respond probably lawyer up then argued that by stonewalling him those sites and their owners are engaging in unlawful trade practice in the state of Oregon under state law he could eventually collect damages most of which would just cover attorneys fees with very little left over to make up for the lost earning power of having his mugshot hovering out there for all to see ladies and gentlemen America but you know he shouldn't have to also it is notoriously difficult to track down the actual owners of these sites almost all of them make their domain registration info private and some don't even bother to provide a valid email address consider what the team at fusion went through trying to trace the owner of mugshots comm earlier this year on their website they say they're owned and operated by jockey sedessa and nevus West Indies I searched domain registrations corporate filings court records and couldn't find any company by that name I did find that the website was registered in Belize so let me get this straight mugshots comm is owned by a company with a Finnish name incorporated and nevus West Indies and registered in Belize punchline it's actually operated from Florida most of the websites we'll dealt with weren't quite that shady some of them were actually quite responsive it quickly became clear that the entire industry without exception is incestuous like a big network connected by subterranean love crafty and tentacles take the Dozen of seemingly unaffiliated websites that replied to wills removal requests with identical emails and which appear to employ the same customer service rep identical serial numbers in Wills mugshot URLs indicated that these twelve sites were using the same photo database court records from a class action lawsuit show that these two are owned by the same guy and that another guy owns these you get the idea it makes sense from a business perspective set up as any mugshot websites as possible cross post the hell out of each mugshot profit sidebar I think the ease of understanding with which we employ it makes sense from a business perspective these days is deeply troubling because it applies on our part to task complicity in a system where practice is that we all acknowledge to be inherently unfair and morally bankrupt or okay because business as a concept exists at a separate plane divorce from any sense of decency we're making the most money at the fastest pace and most consistent rate Trump's literally everything else but that's not the point in this episode so end of side but think about it anyway that's one thousand three hundred ninety three dollars estimate we mentioned earlier that was on the low side there's another industry that profits from a rest related embarrassment online reputation management these guys promise to do the dirty work for you why not just take the DIY approach yourself it's cheaper and there's nothing esoteric about what these companies promise to do take internet reputation calms method step one identify images and information that you need removed well that's just masturbatory deep googling maybe with an Excel spreadsheet in the mix peasy in step three looks intimidating the indexing residual links from search engine sounds like a battle of will between man and machine but in fact it simply means telling Google to purge dead links that used to point to where your mug shot was quit copy and paste not exactly a trade secret but step two is where this whole snake-like industry starts to gorge on its own tail to the point of this fixation because there are basically two proven techniques sites like these use one many are owned by the same people who owned many of the major mug shot web sites yeah free easy for them to eliminate negative information they probably use the same login in most cases it's tough to prove this connection here's an example when we'll sent a removal request to county jail comm he almost immediately received an unsolicited email from erase mug shots calm offering him a complete removal solution race mug shots claimed to acquired wills email address by purchasing leads through a third-party but when you click on the remove your online information button on county jail comm it redirects you to this unprompted erase mug shots calm sends another email this one with the cost estimate they promise to make every single one of wills mug shots disappear in seven days for a one-time fee and if you appreciate fun physical bits this would be a good time to start sipping a drink so that you can then comically spit out eight thousand six hundred and fifty dollars that's about two hundred thirty four dollars per link which is higher than many of these websites charged directly but with a complete removal solution like this one you're not just paying the individual removal costs you're also paying for erase mug shots connections so that's one proven technique the other is that many reputation management web sites have sweetheart deals with the motion web sites they aren't owned by in a 2013 interview with wired arrests org owner Rob Wigan explained how he provided one reputation management company with a special URL it could use to automatically remove any mug shot for only 995 per request we can verify that this is common industry practice of this demonstrates that mugshot websites even the ones that don't blatantly charge for removal have a lot of incentive to make removals as difficult as possible allowing them to keep your info up until you hire a supposed middleman to ask for you gouging customers to fill a need you yourself created what does this remind me of and we merchants have found you really should have some round-the-clock security here there's not what the police are for they do that best but they got the hands full how do you think corporate would feel if for the sake of argument someone threw a brick through your window what if God forbid it wasn't just vandalism what if an employee even the managers say it was assaulted oh right the mob the subtle threatening dealings of the American mafias won't remind me of it so obviously I don't know why I blanked but even if every single motion website stuck to cleaning business practices there's another problem here there's a civil rights argument for making mug shots public record it keeps you from getting disappeared by shady police state mug shots are a necessary evil of an open justice system but there's a difference between booking information popping up on a background check and it being volunteered on the first page of your search results data scientist Hilary Mason suggests the checks and balances value of some friction and cost to getting a booking photos so that is no longer economically feasible to run these sorts of aggregated extortion sites you know like making someone physically go to the police station to submit a request for this information rather than just drawing on the endless data dump most law enforcement agencies offer for free because imagine if any black marks on say your credit report came up whenever someone googled you they don't they come up on credit reports you consent to in a centralized database where if you find a mistake you have a fighting chance of correcting it [Music] after all this will has had a 55 percent success rate getting his mug shots removed but this is in a state where lawmakers have weighed in to say the profiteering from someone's brush with the law regardless of outcome is not okay only another eight states are even considering that idea on a formal level a lot of critics throw their hand in the air and say that fighting the Titans of mug shot publishing at this stage in the game is like trying to put the genie back in the bottle that's simply not true law enforcement agencies take this information down within days of arrest there's only a finite number of places where this information pops up and if you can compel site owners to remove your information and occasionally nudge Google to D index those old links it is quite possible to return your online presence to its pre arrest purity but there's more money in telling people it's futile and there is money to be made by discouraging people with less tenacity energy or time you know people who might be a bit gun-shy about the court system which is likely most people whose mug shot is in wide circulation but it's okay because it's just business [Music] hey everyone thank you for watching this I know it was long and light on jokes but it's an important subject that we care about here at sites honor Sorenson has another article about the same subject on crack we'll put a link down there so you can check it out and see if you can write your Congressman go to your Congressman websites and like and subscribe and comment about how they should fix the government and also like and subscribe to our Channel and tell us how to fix our government

Channel: Cracked

Views: 297,068

Keywords: mugshots, criminal justice, mugshot websites, crimes, felonies, cracked explains, mugshot, justice system, cracked, cracked.com, sketch, comedy, funny, spoof, parody, humor, hilarious

Id: vl7BW9RqANc

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 30 2016