UCLA professor uncovers nationwide scams involving fake court orders

UCLA School of Law professor Eugene Volokh recently uncovered a host of forged court orders and related scams aimed at getting webpages removed from search engines, or “de-indexed,” without a legitimate court proceeding.

Volokh, a leading First Amendment scholar, found more than 200 court orders that were either outright forgeries or probably obtained through deceit, he said. These “orders” were sent to search engines, mostly Google, in an attempt to get them to remove websites from their search results.

Volokh found eight different types of de-indexing scams including: outright court forgeries; fake stipulated injunctions involving both fake defendants and fake notaries; default judgments obtained without looking for the defendant; plaintiffs who sued a single webpage commentator rather than the author; and orders obtained based on fake author recantations.

Volokh’s interest in the subject occurred serendipitously. In August 2016, he received a call from an old colleague of his, Matthew Chan. Yelp had contacted Chan about a court order, based on a stipulation he allegedly signed, stating that a negative review he wrote of his local dentist was defamatory.

Chan had not only never signed the stipulation, he had no idea he was ever sued. Although the listed defendant in the court order shared Chan’s name, he was from Baltimore, whereas Volokh’s friend lived in Georgia — a fact the plaintiff, Chan’s local Georgia-based dentist, must have known.

When Volokh did some digging, he noticed certain odd phrases in the stipulation, such as: “Dated, so respectfully.”

Searching legal databases, Volokh uncovered 25 orders that contained the same strange boilerplate language, 15 of which listed a defendant’s address.

With the help of Paul Levy from Public Counsel and private detective Giles Miller, (who offered his services for free), Volokh uncovered a startling fact: None of the 15 addresses listed in the cases bore any relationship to the authors of the posts.

Somebody was signing these stipulations, but it wasn’t the authors.

Levy traced the source of the orders to a man named Richart Ruddie, owner of the reputation management companies SEO Profile Defender Network LLC and RIR1984 LLC.

Volokh quickly realized there may be more of these “fake defendant” court orders, but he needed a way to more easily find them.

Enter: The Lumen Database.

The Lumen Database is a project of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and, among other uses, acts as a sort of internet storage unit for Google’s de-indexing requests.

Volokh got in touch with Lumen and asked them for a big batch of orders — a number that ran into the thousands.

After isolating the relevant court orders, Volokh came to a second startling conclusion: There were a whole lot of fraudulent court orders being sent to Google.

“Naïve boy that I was, I really didn’t think forgery,” Volokh said.

While some of the forgeries were sophisticated, others made sophomoric mistakes, like an order purportedly signed by “Los Angeles Circuit Judge Pamela Brown.”

“I wouldn’t expect to know the name Pamela Brown, but I do know there are no circuit court judges in L.A. Superior Court,” Volokh said.

He began realizing that hidden in plain sight were troves of forged court orders that were sent to Google to de-index websites — all without any court proceeding, or the author ever being notified.

These forged orders were aimed at de-indexing webpages ranging from criticism of an Indonesian billionaire, unflattering newspaper articles about a disgraced sports agent, scientific studies critical of Scientology-linked drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers, and even other courts’ decisions.

“And then I started seeing other things,” Volokh said.

For example, he noticed seven court orders from the same lawyer in Texas; the parties were from Texas but the notary stamp was from California.

“We hear about eco-tourism, medical tourism, even sex tourism — but we never hear about notarization tourism,” Volokh said.

After tracking down the logbook entries of the notary (which they are required to hand over upon request and receipt of a 30-cent payment), Volokh discovered that the defendants in the case were not the authors of the posts.

Volokh got in touch with friends of his with connections to the Texas attorney general’s office, who opened a case that culminated in a $300,000 default judgment against the group behind the court orders, the Solvera Group.

Volokh then began noticing other cases from an Arizona law firm, where the notarizations seemed fake. He looked up one alleged notary, “Samantha Pierce,” and found out she didn’t exist. He did the same thing with another, with the same result.

Volokh alerted the Arizona Bar, which, in a final judgment and order dated July 30, 2018, publicly admonished the lawyer involved and put him on two years’ probation.

“I’m an officer of the court. It seems to me when we see these things happening in courts, courts ought to know,” Volokh said

He then began seeing various other schemes, one of which was to get Google to de-index news articles based on a single comment.

The scam goes something like this. The plaintiff wants an article, such as a critical CNN article, de-indexed. If the plaintiff sues CNN, chances are CNN will defend its right to editorial discretion, and the webpage will stay up.

But, if the plaintiff sues a single commentator and wins a favorable judgment, the plaintiff can use that judgment to try to de-index the entire CNN article — whether or not the article itself contains any defamatory statements. This is largely the result of a hole in Google’s de-indexing system whereby it de-indexes an entire webpage rather than an isolated defamatory comment.

Volokh found numerous examples of this, including at a Texas TV station. To be sure it was an illegitimate request, Volokh called the TV station, which had never even received a request to remove the comment.

This got Volokh wondering: “The comment was ridiculously over the top. ... Was the comment posted specifically to provide an excuse for the de-indexing order?”

Volokh found two more suspicious ways plaintiffs evade the First Amendment.

One is to attempt to obtain a default judgment without genuinely attempting to locate the defendant. While ordinarily such judgments are meaningless, in de-indexing cases they are actually advantageous. That is because the real prize is not against the defendant, but to get a legitimate court order to send to Google. And a default judgment is a cheap way to obtain one.

Volokh found dozens of cases in Tallahassee, Florida, alone, where there is no evidence that plaintiffs tried to find defendants in any meaningful way.

Lastly, there is the, “Are you lying then, or are you lying now?” type of deceit.

A well-known example comes from Megan Welter, who was a semi-famous cheerleader for the Arizona Cardinals, as well as an Iraq war veteran. Her celebrity status took a spill when she was arrested for attacking her then-boyfriend, Ryan McMahon. The arrest was the subject of numerous articles.

Some years later, she attempted to get a number of those articles de-indexed by suing various news outlets, and got McMahon to sign a stipulated injunction, stating that his statements in the articles were false and defamatory.

In the court hearing, McMahon stood by the veracity of his statements:

“Even though she did these things, I really believe that everybody deserves a fresh start. ...I guess I just hope she learns her lesson and I hope she takes this as a carrot, and doesn’t do it again,” McMahon said in the court proceeding.

Despite this, Welter got a court order that deemed McMahon’s statements false and defamatory, based on McMahon’s stipulation admitting to those “facts.”

The problem of fake court orders is so ubiquitous that Volokh himself has been the target of at least three attempts to use forged court orders to get him to remove articles.

In one, Volokh received an Ohio court order that was part of an expungement order, which means it was sealed and therefore impossible to look up online. Volokh called the Ohio judge who “signed” the order, who assured Volokh the order was forged.

In another, Volokh received a court order alleging copyright infringement for quotes he used in a blog post about a Times of London story where he was the main source.

“I thought it would be kind of schmucky where he would get something de-indexed after I gave him the tip,” Volokh said of the journalist. So, he called the reporter up. Sure enough, the journalist, Billy Kenber, had not submitted the court order. Another forgery.

Volokh details his findings in an upcoming law review article, which will be published next year.