You’ve just found that your photo, your mugshot, which was obtained from a public government website, is now being posted on multiple websites that exhibit mugshots of all those who have been arrested by unscrupulous operators. A mugshot post appears to immediately grow and proliferate as an army of bots begins crawling the internet and spreading your photo. The majority of these websites are managed by dubious operators based out of state or even abroad, where restrictions are frequently slack. Mugshots can only be published by operators of websites categorized as newspapers.
Almost every state is considering laws to address the illegality of these police stations. For local legislation, always check your state statutes. Using deceptive and unethical efforts to persuade you that you can pay to remove mugshots almost always results in your mugshot appearing on additional websites. Once it is established that an arrestee paid to have his or her mugshot removed, the person becomes a target for future extortion and abuse. The state law that tackles the financial motivation for these firms, mainly background check agencies or the like, to display images and arrest records alongside advertising is nearly always banned. There are four ways you should know about if you want help to remove mugshots from the web.
Automatic/ Do Nothing
This strategy is predicated on the idea that when more recent mugshots are posted to government websites, your photo will gradually fade away. His portrait, in a sense, moves to the next page with each successive arrest. Depending on how many fresh arrests are made in your area, it may take some time, but your photo will ultimately appear on page 16. Arizona has 15 pages of mugshots and takes 3-4 days to process, depending on the number of arrests. His/her mugshot could not be searched at the time.
Case Rejection
If you can show confirmation that your case has been officially dismissed, sealed, or erased, most of these operators will remove mugshots of yours. It will need drafting a letter or email asking for removal, followed by a phone call, but it is a viable option.
Demand Letter
This method of removal necessitates writing an assertive letter or enlisting the assistance of a Remove mugshots agency to write a letter, they can get your mugshots removed within 72 Hours. If the mugshots do not get removed, they will provide you a full refund, referencing state statutes and legal remedies / stiff penalties for continuing to display your mugshot when it is surrounded by advertisements for background check companies. Many states, including Arizona, have implemented legislation making it unlawful for these operations to profit from criminal records. Fines build up rapidly and are an efficient way for the website operator to comply.
Suppression
Remove mugshots and replacing them with more relevant information is one of the most successful approaches. “The greatest location to hide a body is on the second page of Google,” someone once stated. You can easily surpass mugshot websites by providing more relevant data about oneself on the Internet using what is known as online reputation management strategies. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the fancy word for this. Ninety percent of people don’t go past the first page, making this a good way to bury a mugshot. By gathering and organizing your assets, such as your LinkedIn profile, Twitter account, Facebook account, volunteer activities, updated images, and so on, you are providing Google, Bing, and Yahoo with more important material to rank higher than your mugshot.