Hello,<p>I recently had a traffic ticket, nothing too serious just license plate issues. However I "uncovered" a huge extortion scheme going on and supported by Paypal. This website is crawling public data (such as court records, traffic tickets) and then gets it index by Google. The idea is to publicly shame people and extort money to remove the data from the website. The surprising part is that it processes payments with Paypal ...<p>It's obviously a scam that's been going on for a while and already brought to Paypal's attention on their forum: https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Payments-Archive/Illegal-Website-using-Paypal/td-p/649217<p>The person behind it is running several other extortion websites, so I guess it is somehow a profitable business.<p>Paypal is usually over cautious (to say the least) to disable/freeze legit accounts but this one is still up and running.<p>I understand that the data is public so you can probably crawl it (need to check some robots.txt before confirming it) but using that to extort money is probably not that legal.<p>Anyway this is my discovery of the day.
> but using that to extort money is probably not that legal.<p>It's all in how it's worded. If someone creates a website that lists the names and shows the faces of convicted drunk drivers for example, the creator can justify it as a public service, using public records as its source of information. And the creator can agree to remove a listing for a fee, as long as he doesn't explicitly say that a payment is required to effect the removal of a particular article -- that would be extortion, illegal nearly everywhere.<p>But there's more. If the website's location is unknown, or if it's sited in a place with a flexible attitude toward law and order, then the prohibition against extortion may essentially go away.<p>Some of the U.S.-based extortion sites are being threatened with lawsuits, but on shaky legal grounds:<p><a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/mugshot-removal-extortion/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/mugshot-removal-ext...</a><p>Quote: "“First of all, I think [plaintiff attorney] Scott has insurmountable problems with the First Amendment. The mugshots, as you may or may not know, are public record,” said Lance Winchester, a Texas attorney for BustedMugshots.com and MugshotsOnline.com, which charge under $100 to remove mugs from their sites."