It seemed like she was just having a fun night out on the town, but it took a turn for the worse when Lori accidentally struck a parked car while driving her friends home from a party.
That in of itself might not have been a big deal, but she had had one beer, hours earlier at the party, and the fender bender upset her a lot. She just knew her dad was going to freak out. One of her friends hit her head on a side window when the accident occurred, and felt sick and unsteady on her feet. A bystander that saw the accident insisted that Lori and her friends stay put while the police and an ambulance were called.
The police that showed up seemed to not believe that she had only one drink, hours earlier, and insisted on administering a sobriety test — they said their breathalyzer unit was malfunctioning, so they would just assess her balance and ask her a few questions. She failed the test — she was nervous and upset, and stumbled while trying to walk an imaginary line, and she never had been good at counting backwords.
The police arrested her, and then also asked to search her car. She agreed to the search, but she didn’t know that one of her friends had hidden some illegal drugs under the carseat. They issued an underage drinking citation to one of her friends, added illegal possession charges onto the arrest citation, impounded her vehicle, and took her into the station to be booked.
The attorney her parents hired helped get the entire thing straightened out. The DUI charges were dropped, one of her friends confessed to owning the drugs and plead to a minor charge, she got her car out of impound, and the attorney helped make sure the entire arrest record was expunged from state and local records.
But, one of her best friends was the first to notice that information about the arrest was appearing in Google when Lori’s name was searched upon. A local newspaper frequently published a “police blotter” section, and this resulted in there being an article about her which mentioned all the charges, along with her arrest mugshot. Not only did the article appear in the search results, but a line of pictures of her was also there, and the mugshot was the very first one.
Some other website that specializes in publishing arrest records also repeated all the information and the mugshot — and this also showed up in the search results listings in addition to the mugshot photo image.
Lori was horrified–she was going to graduate within a year, and these arrest reports and mugshots could keep her from getting a job.
She wrote an email to the newspaper’s editor, and felt very fortunate when they answered her. They told her that with copies of papers from her attorney establishing that the charges had been dropped and expunged, they would delete the news article. She emailed them back the copies. Within three days, the article was no longer available, and when she clicked on the search results listing for it, it just showed an error page that stated “Page Not Found”.
She wrote a similar note to the mugshot website, but they did not respond. She read the site’s pages and discovered that it was their policy not to remove anything at all. The site’s pages did advise that one could contact a reputation management firm that might be able to help.
She called up the reputation firm they listed, and the friendly salesperson stated that they could “get the page and the mugshot entirely deleted”, for a fee of $3,000. She told him she would think about him and contact him back.
Lori was scared–she didn’t have thousands of dollars to use for this, and she also felt very guilty at the idea of asking her parents for more after they had helped so much with the attorney.
Also, she was concerned: how could the reputation firm get the page and mugshot “deleted” if the website that published the materials had a policy that it would not remove anything? The claim they would get it deleted seemed like it would be too good to be true.
Lori then read some articles about mugshot websites and discovered that some made their money through reputation firms they promoted–it was one of the only ways they could make money, because credit card companies generally refused to allow such businesses to have merchant accounts–it was considered borderline extortionary to refuse to take down reputation-damaging materials that gave a false impression about people. In some cases, the shadowy people behind the mugshot websites apparently just stole people’s money outright, not bothering to remove anything.
She felt offended that these sites made money off of holding people’s online reputations hostage in return for money, so she explored some other options.
One of her friends had told her about a reputation company on the radio. She looked up the company’s website and found it described situations like hers, and they explained how they built web contents to displace negative materials such as mugshot websites. While this was not as ideal to her as getting the stuff removed entirely, it did give her hope that she could get improvement without paying off the mugshot scam company. She called the company, but they quoted an even larger price than the firm associated with the arrest website, and they wanted her to pay them for at least a six-month period. There was no way she could afford that.
Lori sought out the top reputation firms, and spoke to each of them, but all of them wanted many thousands of dollars. Her heart sank.
Fortunately, Lori found us! We explained to her how we could break up the elements of her online reputation program into parts that could be paid for over the course of some months. She would only have to pay from $50 to a few hundred dollars a month, depending on what elements were involved. Eventually, all the steps would be completed.
Lori figured that while she would like to get her reputation improved much faster, this path allowed her an realistic option, and she might get her reputation fixed sufficiently by the time she graduated. Best of all, she knew she could find a way to pay for the monthly fees.
After seven months of working on Lori’s reputation, the arrest record page and mugshot no longer showed up on the first page of search results for her name.
The system we used on Lori’s reputation project is the same one that we have quantified and componentized here at iReputation.Repair. We have used this approach with a number of arrest records or mugshot cases, and it is consistently successful.
Although each type of reputation issue has its own unique challenges, by and large any negative page or image that appears in search engine results will respond to similar approaches.
iReputation.Repair is a monthly subscription service, and provides you a self-help guide for managing your own reputation. Our subscription provides you with a curriculum to learn how to do each step in the process. Our tools and recommended partners will save you money and time. And, our monthly newsletter will alert you to new and emerging changes in the landscape that could affect your reputation improvement project. Finally, our research identifies new items that could benefit your project and help it to displace any negative items sustainably into the future as search engine algorithms change, and as the ranking ability of reputation-harming websites waxes or wanes.