Tech News
Fake takedowns —
A CBS investigation finds at least 60 examples of fake court orders in takedowns.
Timothy B. Lee
– Jul 26, 2019 4: 21 pm UTC
Enlarge / Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
It’s not easy to convince Google to remove unflattering information about you from its search results. One of the few reasons Google will remove search listings if it gets a court order to do so. But getting a court order isn’t easy, either. Courts have held that the First Amendment gives publications broad discretion to decide what kind of information to publish—especially if it’s accurate.
As a result, some unscrupulous parties have taken an unethical—and likely criminal—shortcut: they sent Google fake court orders, complete with forged signatures from a judge. An investigation by CBS News uncovered more than 60 cases where someone used this tactic.
“CBS News sorted through thousands of these court orders and spotted small businesses from all across America trying to clean up their reputations,” two CBS reporters write. “But we also spotted a problem: Dozens of the court documents were fakes.”
CBS says that some are obviously fake, like one document with a case number of “1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9.” Others appear to be more subtle forgeries. The most recent fake document they found was filed in April. CBS reports that two of the documents were submitted by convicted sex offenders who hoped to scrub Google of references to their crimes.
Google says it works hard to catch this kind of fraud.
“We are always vigilant to protect our legal removals process from bad actors,” a company spokesman told Ars by email. “We have processes in place to verify the veracity of court orders, and if we are alerted to removals made in error, we will reinstate that content as appropriate.”
Forging a judge’s signature is a serious crime. In October, a New York man was sentenced to nine months in prison for “conspiring to forge a federal judge’s signature on counterfeit court orders that he submitted to Google to get negative reviews about his business removed from Google search results.” Between 2014 and 2017, the man created more than 10 fake court documents purporting to find negative reviews of his business to be defamatory and ordering them removed from search results.