michael arnstein – Techdirt (original) (raw)

CEO Gets Nine Months In Prison For Forging Court Documents Ordering Google To Delist Negative Reviews

from the nowaythisplancouldfail.pdf dept

Fake court orders have landed a businessman real jail time. Michael Arnstein, CEO of Natural Sapphire Company, pled guilty last year to forging court orders he sent to Google to delist negative reviews. This was apparently the lesson Arnstein learned from his single, successful defamation suit: it’s cheaper and easier to forge documents than jump through judicial hoops for several months to achieve the same ends.

In fact, he said as much to others seeking solutions to negative review problems — all preserved as evidence used against him by the DOJ:

“No bullshit: if I could do it all over again I would have found another court order injunction for removal of links (probably something that can be found online pretty easily) made changes in photoshop to show the links that I wanted removed and then sent to ‘removals@google.com’ as a pdf — showing the court order docket number, the judges [sic] signature — but with the new links put in,” Arnstein wrote in a July 2014 email, according to his criminal complaint. “Google isn’t checking this stuff; that’s the bottom line b/c I spent 30,000fuckinthousanddollarsandnearly2fuckinyearstodowhatlegitcouldhavebeendoneforabout6hoursofsearchingandphotoshopbyaguyfor30,000 fuckin thousand dollars and nearly 2 fuckin years to do what legit could have been done for about 6 hours of searching and photoshop by a guy for 30,000fuckinthousanddollarsandnearly2fuckinyearstodowhatlegitcouldhavebeendoneforabout6hoursofsearchingandphotoshopbyaguyfor200., all in ONE DAY”.

Well, Google must have been “checking this stuff,” because the DOJ’s press release about Arnstein’s nine-month prison sentence specifically thanks the company for its “helpful assistance in this investigation.” To add irony to self-inflicted injury, Arnstein’s sentencing was delivered in the same court he impersonated. Arnstein gets nine months for forging court orders, and three years of supervised release following his prison term.

There may be more indictments and sentences on the horizon. The DOJ press release doesn’t name names, but makes it clear it wasn’t just Arnstein participating in this fraud.

In furtherance of this scheme, ARNSTEIN and others forged the signature of a United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York on more than 10 counterfeit court orders.

Those would presumably be the unnamed employees referenced in the criminal complaint who helped Arnstein edit PDFs he would later forward to Google for URL delisting. Now that Arnstein is a convicted criminal, I wonder if his position on lawyers has changed. From another Arnstein email contained in the criminal complaint:

I think you should take legal advice with a grain of salt. I spent 100k on lawyers to get a court order injunction to have things removed from Google and Youtube, only to photoshop the documents for future use when new things ‘popped up’ and google legal never double checked my docs for validity… I could have just saved 100k and 2 years of waiting/damage if I just used photoshop and a few hours of creative editing… Lawyers are often worse than the criminals.

Sure, but in this case, the criminal might have wanted to run his reputation management plan past a competent lawyer first and saved himself the trouble. Arnstein wanted to clean up his company’s reputation but only managed to destroy his. Whatever nasty things online reviewers said about Natural Sapphire Company, they’re always going to pale in comparison to its CEO’s federal prison sentence.

Filed Under: delisting order, doj, fake court orders, forgeries, michael arnstein, reputation management, reviews
Companies: google, natural sapphire

Company CEO Pleads Guilty After Forging Judge's Signatures On Bogus Court Orders Sent To Google

from the SEO-suicide dept

Earlier this spring, a jewelry company CEO earned himself a federal indictment for his bespoke reputation management efforts. Realizing it was extremely difficult to erase negative reviews from the net, National Sapphire Company boss Michael Arnstein took one such reviewer to court. He was awarded an injunction after the defendant no-showed, resulting in the delisting of 54 URLs.

But the negative reviews kept coming. Rather than hire a lawyer and bring more defamation suits, Arnstein opted for the initially less-costly option: mocking up delisting orders and forging a judge’s signature. This apparently worked well enough Arnstein felt comfortable sharing his fraudulent tactics with others. This swaggering, inculpatory statement was included in the federal complaint.

“No bullshit: if I could do it all over again I would have found another court order injunction for removal of links (probably something that can be found online pretty easily) made changes in photoshop to show the links that I wanted removed and then sent to ‘removals@google.com’ as a pdf — showing the court order docket number, the judges [sic] signature — but with the new links put in,” Arnstein wrote in a July 2014 email, according to his criminal complaint. “Google isn’t checking this stuff; that’s the bottom line b/c I spent 30,000fuckinthousanddollarsandnearly2fuckinyearstodowhatlegitcouldhavebeendoneforabout6hoursofsearchingandphotoshopbyaguyfor30,000 fuckin thousand dollars and nearly 2 fuckin years to do what legit could have been done for about 6 hours of searching and photoshop by a guy for 30,000fuckinthousanddollarsandnearly2fuckinyearstodowhatlegitcouldhavebeendoneforabout6hoursofsearchingandphotoshopbyaguyfor200., all in ONE DAY”.

The DOJ — aided greatly by Arnstein generating plenty of evidence against himself — pulled the trigger on a federal indictment. And, thanks to several other cases of rep management firms defrauding courts, Google is indeed “checking this stuff,” limiting the effectiveness of impersonating judges and/or sliding bogus paperwork past them.

Arnstein has now pled guilty to a conspiracy charge, the DOJ reports.

ARNSTEIN, 40, of Kailua, Hawaii, pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to forge a judicial signature, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. The maximum potential sentence is prescribed by Congress and is provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencing of the defendant will be determined by the judge.

And one more bit of schadenfreude:

Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim said: “As he admitted today, Michael Arnstein exploited the authority of the federal judiciary in a blatantly criminal scheme. By forging court orders and the signature of a U.S. District Judge, Arnstein was able to effectively erase websites critical of Arnstein’s business from its search results. Now Arnstein awaits sentencing in the same court he impersonated.”

Some sympathy is warranted for those hoping to battle negative reviews. Even illegitimate negative reviews can be close to impossible to remove from the web. But if the system seems unfair, it has to be. Making it easier to remove bogus reviews would just make it easier for companies/individuals who’ve earned every acidic word in their negative reviews to scrub the web of bad things.

The internet may be a well-oiled hate machine, but it’s also a handy source of reference for customers who want to emerge unscathed from interactions with providers of goods and services. Easy delistings would turn the web into a cheery place where every company appears to exceed expectations, even as they screw their customers over.

Filed Under: doj, fake court orders, fake lawsuits, michael arnstein, reputation management, seo
Companies: national sapphire company

Feds Say Jewelry Company CEO Scrubbed Google Results With Fake Court Orders And Forged Judge's Signatures

from the sign-here-to-self-destruct dept

Juicing your SEO? Don’t like what turns up during vanity Googling? There are a few right ways to solve this problem and apparently about a million wrong ones.

Doing the wrong thing could easily make things worse. Bogus DMCA notices tend to result in Streisandings, which leads to even more negative comments and contents clogging up your search results. Bogus legal threats issued by stupid lawyers or using stupid, compliant lawyers’ letterhead tend to have the same result.

You could get more imaginative and start filing bogus defamation lawsuits to fraudulently obtain court orders for delisting. Again, once you’ve been rousted, the best case scenario is some more Streisanding and negative ROI. At worst, you’re looking at paying legal fees and/or possibly facing sanctions for defrauding the court.

If you want the worst results and the worst punishment, you could do what this jewelry company CEO did:

In 2011, sapphire jewelry company CEO Michael Arnstein was desperate to salvage the Google results for his company. According to a lawsuit for defamation he filed in 2011, a former contractor for the Natural Sapphire Company who was fired for selling them buggy software launched a personal crusade to destroy the Natural Sapphire Company’s Google search results. The defendant never showed up in court, so in 2012, a federal judge in New York granted Arnstein a default judgment along with an injunction to de-index 54 Google results.

But more fake reviews kept popping up. So Arnstein did something extremely ill-advised. According to the feds, Arnstein rounded up the bad Google results and forged new court orders to send to Google.

Some sympathy for Arnstein is warranted. Negative reviews — even the fake ones — are hard to remove from the web. This isn’t necessarily the fault of sites hosting them, but the actions of a few hundred aggrieved companies and individuals who have tried nearly everything (legal or illegal) to have negative content and comments removed, even if they’re guilty of what’s being alleged in them.

But nuking yourself from orbit is never the answer. It wasn’t enough for Arnstein to have successfully (if fraudulently) cleaned up his search results. Nope. He just had to tell others. The feds collected multiple instances of Arnstein informing others how to fix their SEO problems USING THIS ONE ILLEGAL TRICK. From the complaint [PDF]:

No bullshit: if I could do it all over again I would have found another court order injunction for removal of links (probably something that can be found online pretty easily) made changes in photoshop to show the links that I wanted removed and then sent to ‘removals@google.com’ as a pdf — showing the court order docket number, the judges [sic] signature — but with the new links put in,” Arnstein wrote in a July 2014 email, according to his criminal complaint. “Google isn’t checking this stuff; that’s the bottom line b/c I spent 30,000fuckinthousanddollarsandnearly2fuckinyearstodowhatlegitcouldhavebeendoneforabout6hoursofsearchingandphotoshopbyaguyfor30,000 fuckin thousand dollars and nearly 2 fuckin years to do what legit could have been done for about 6 hours of searching and photoshop by a guy for 30,000fuckinthousanddollarsandnearly2fuckinyearstodowhatlegitcouldhavebeendoneforabout6hoursofsearchingandphotoshopbyaguyfor200., all in ONE DAY.

Here’s another ill-advised Arnstein statement from Courthouse News, which first reported the indictment. It opens with an unforgettable disclaimer… and ends with a statement that might make it tough for Arnstein to find representation:

“I think you should take legal advice with a grain of salt,” he allegedly wrote on Sept. 4, 2014. “I spent 100k on lawyers to get a court order injunction to have things removed from Google and Youtube, only to photoshop the documents for future use when new things ‘popped up’ and google legal never double checked my docs for validity… I could have saved 100k and 2 years of waiting/damage if I just used photoshop and a few hours of creative editing… Lawyers are often worse than the criminals.”

Arnstein wanted to clean up bogus complaints and comments from a pissed off contractor. I guess that goal has been achieved. But those results will be replaced with his criminal indictment, fraudulent behavior, and his failure to get away with it.

Filed Under: forged court orders, michael arnstein, search results, seo
Companies: natural sapphire company