Forged U.K. Court Order Aimed at Vanishing Newspaper Article About English Businessman Mason Soiza
So reports the Times of London, which was the target of the purported order.
An excerpt from the Times article (Billy Kenber):
Last week two fake documents were sent to Google in an attempt to censor a Times article revealing concerns about an online pharmacy run by an alleged internet spammer. The documents, including an order which purported to be from the UK Supreme Court, were sent to the tech giant in an attempt to get the article removed from its search result.
The "de-indexing" request was submitted in the name of Mason Soiza, 24, the owner of UK Meds, although he denied making the request. It comes amid concerns about how businesses, individuals and law firms are using takedown requests to remove damaging information from searches. At least 75 fake court documents have been sent to Google, according to a US academic….
Mr Soiza, who has emailed The Times to ask for the newspaper to "de-index" the article about him, said he had not created the forged documents or submitted them to Google. He said they were "100 per cent not sent by me" and added that they "look awful".
He said he had hired a company called DeIndex to "clear my name" and offered £6,000 if it succeeded in "removing false information about me online" but he did not know anything about its methods. Someone claiming to represent DeIndex on the company's Skype account said that it had not made any submissions to Google or created the documents.
Thanks, as always, to the Lumen Database. For more on prosecutions for forgeries of American court orders, see here, here, and here; for more on forgeries of American court orders that have not led to prosecution, see here and here. Here are the two pages of the forged order, which also seems to have been planned as a means of vanishing some other articles, including The Man Behind Plugin Spam: Mason Soiza (WordFence, Mark Maunder):
