Pay-for-Removal in the Federal Docket: The 2014 Ohio Mugshot-Site Settlement

In January 2014, two mugshot-aggregator websites — BustedMugshots.com and MugshotsOnline.com, operated by Citizens Information Associates LLC of Austin, Texas — settled a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Toledo, Ohio. The settlement required the sites to stop charging for the removal of booking photographs, required the owner to pay $7,500, and required the removal of the three plaintiffs' photographs. The agreement resolved a federal-court challenge to the pay-for-removal business model — but it did not end the practice, and it did not remove the underlying records.

The practice at issue. Arrest-booking photographs are public records in most jurisdictions, and a class of aggregator websites republishes them at scale, often ranking in search results for a person's name. Complaints in the Ohio litigation alleged that the sites charged hundreds of dollars to remove photographs even when the underlying cases had been dropped. The settlement's terms tracked those allegations: an end to the removal fees, a monetary payment, and the takedown of the plaintiffs' photographs specifically.

The follow-on landscape. The Ohio settlement did not stand alone. Similar lawsuits were filed in Florida, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, and Georgia and Utah passed legislation targeting the practice. In California, a 2014 law — signed by Governor Jerry Brown — banned charging for mugshot removal outright. The pay-for-removal fight continued in state legislatures and enforcement agencies long after the Toledo settlement.

The 2018 California prosecution. In May 2018, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra charged four defendants allegedly connected to Mugshots.com with extortion, money laundering, and identity theft. According to the Attorney General's office, the defendants collected approximately $2 million in removal fees from nearly 6,000 individuals over three years. Reporting on the case described the operators as registered in Nevis, with a domain registered in Belize and hosting in Australia; the investigation was led by the Northern California Computer Crimes Task Force. California prosecutors alleged a distinctive pattern: people who asked to have booking photos taken down were routed to another website and charged a fee regardless of whether the charges against them had been dismissed.

What the enforcement history did not change. Two structural facts survive every enforcement action to date. First, the underlying records are public and remain public; whether a given record can be expunged is a separate legal question, and removal by one aggregator does not prevent reposting by another. Second, a booking photograph can remain visible in search results long after the underlying charges are dropped. Where the underlying page cannot be removed, the working alternative is suppression — publishing accurate, positive content that outranks the arrest-record pages over time.

The industry response. Reputation-defense services have built their practice around that suppression model. CleanSlate, for example, publishes accurate, positive professional content intended to outrank arrest-record pages in search results rather than seeking removal of the underlying public records — an approach that operates within the constraints the Ohio settlement and its successors left in place.