Two alleged owners of Mugshots.com—Sahar Sarid and Thomas Keesee—have been arrested in south Florida on a recently issued California warrant. The notorious website publishes mugshots and then demands payment for their removal.
On Wednesday, the attorney general of California brought criminal charges against not only Sarid and Keesee, but also Kishore Vidya Bhavnanie and David Usdan. The quartet has been charged with extortion, money laundering, and identity theft.
Bhavnanie was arraigned by a Pennsylvania state judge also on Wednesday—his bail was reportedly set at $1.86 million. According to Tania Mercado, a spokeswoman for the California Attorney General’s office, Usdan is also in custody.
“This pay-for-removal scheme attempts to profit off of someone else’s humiliation,” said Attorney General Becerra in a statement. “Those who can’t afford to pay into this scheme to have their information removed pay the price when they look for a job, housing, or try to build relationships with others. This is exploitation, plain and simple.”
Related links:
California Charges Mugshots.com Owners . . . Then Releases Their Mugshots [jonathanturley.org 5/20/18]
Welcome to California. I hope you get to stay here for a long time. We have plenty of room for you at Hotel San Quentin. I’m sure all the other San Quentin guests who’s photos you’ve published will take good care of you.
THEY DID NOT ARREST EVERYONE WHO OWNS OR OPERATES THE WEBSITE.
A couple days ago I contacted the unpublishing service to ask that my information be removed free of charge. Long story short, I got the typical threats. Prior to that phone call, my information had been out of date going back to 2011. After the phone call, it was updated to my current information.
I believe my phone call triggered the person on the other end of the line who threatened me, to actually go through with modifying my profile page. This person was behind the phone number listed for UNPUBLISHING/DE-LISTING information.
I believe I know the identify of that person. I have his personal landline number as a result of a foobar on the part of their phone system.
what are they going to do to them ? send them to a golf course for a vacation , if we are lucky they will hit them with a fat fine that hurts just enough to make other companies stop posting our info , that would help a lot , because most don’t even use the state Top Hit list of shame they use home facts and a feed sack full of others .
Something everybody is missing from this story is how the CA AG is filing criminal charges against people for humiliating American citizens and hindering their lives – their abilty to find employment, housing, even relationships – by publicly listing their past transgressions.
If such activities are illegal based on how debilitating they can be to a person’s life, then this case should be paramount in future challenges to the registry in a court of law.
To the team at ACSOL, please share this video from the California’s Dept of Justice on this matter. They are encouraging ANYONE who’s mugshot was taken in California and appears on the Mugshots com to contact the US Dept of Justice’s crimes center via email.
Website owners Sahar Sarid, Thomas Keesee and Kishore Vidya Bhavnanie are being charged with 51 counts conspiracy, extortion, attempted extortion, identity theft and money laundering. The 4th person is David Usdan. He is charged with 7 counts of conspiracy, extortion and identity theft.
They are all being extradited to California and I have alerts for 2 of them from the VINELink website. 3 of the individuals show up in the VINELink system which helps you located where they are.
Here is the complaint: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4465207/MUGSHOT-FILED-ARREST-WARRANT-Redacted.pdf
Even though the document is HEAVILY redacted, I have nearly all of the information that has been redacted.
Yet the site remains active with posts as recent as 5/18.
If they are immigrants or here on work/student visas( and the names suggest that) then they will be deported after serving what ever sentence they get.
So the government will prosecute a private business (Mugshots.com) for extortion. But yet government will do much worse when they operate the Megan’s Law website, require sex offender registration, shame a person through a passport marking, impose residential and presence restrictions, conduct dubious “compliance checks,” deny occupational licencing and Section 8 housing benefits… the list goes on…
Maybe the government should prosecute itself for committing much WORSE crimes than those they seek to bring to “justice.”
The mugshots of a couple of them.
https://www.theroot.com/mugshot-com-owners-arrested-for-extortion-1826133048
Guess what everyone now “Instant Checkmate.com” has us up on the internet!
Even those of us whom are not on Megan’s Law!
Janice or anybody can we stop this madness of these sites posting our info!!!!!!!
It appears mugshots.com has gone down. It is has been down the entire day today (5/30), producing nothing more than a 503 HTTP Error. I filed a complaint against them with their webhost, Amazon AWS, last week, ensuring to inform Amazon that the State of California has issued indictments against the owners of the site, which has been used for criminal activity. Lets hope it stays down. Perhaps the government will seize the domain, ensuring it can never be used again.
I’d add a financial gain angle on it. Those folks @AJ mentioned have money to spend. Jeff Bezos would want them to spend it at Amazon.
This last sentence could be very important in other types of cases:
“But once the case is resolved the evidence that they have collected will be available to use by the other affected people around the country.”