California’s
attorney general said Wednesday he has filed extortion and money laundering
charges against owners of the website Mugshots.com, accusing them of posting
mugshot photos and then charging those pictured money to remove the the photos
from the internet.
California
Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra said the four people charged received more than
$64,000 in removal fees from some 175 Californians over a three-year period.
Nationally, the scheme took in $2 million in from 5,703 people over the same
period.
The
site posted mugshots taken from law enforcement websites even if the people who
were arrested never had charges filed against them or later had them dropped.
The mugshots can make it harder for them to get jobs and housing, Becerra said.
“This
pay-for-removal scheme attempts to profit off of someone else’s humiliation,”
Becerra said in a statement. “This is exploitation, plain and simple.”