Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. News

Owners of Mugshots.com charged with extortion and other crimes

By

Two of the alleged owners of Mugshots.com, Sahar Sarid and Thomas Keesee, have been arrested in Florida. Mugshots.com is a website that publishes mugshots and charges for their removal. In addition to Sarid and Keesee, the site’s other two owners, Kishore Vidya Bhavnanie and David Usdan, have also been arrested.

Ars Technica reports that the four men stand accused of identity theft, money laundering, and extortion. Sarid and Kessee were arrested on warrants issued by the State of California and the state’s Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, has called the website exploitative.

Recommended Videos

“This pay-for-removal scheme attempts to profit off of someone else’s humiliation,” Becerra said in a statement released by his office. “Those who can’t afford to pay into this scheme to have their information removed pay the price when they look for a job, housing, or try to build relationships with others. This is exploitation, plain and simple.”

Please enable Javascript to view this content

In the statement, Becerra’s office said that Mugshots.com extorted more than $64,000 from 175 people with California addresses. On the national stage, Mugshots.com took in an excess of $2 million from more than 5,700 individuals.

Mugshots.com charged people hundreds of dollars to have their photos removed from the site’s database. To make matters worse, the site did not differentiate between those who were successfully prosecuted, found not guilty, or even those who had been never formally charged with a crime. If you were arrested for any reason, your photo could end up on Mugshots.com, where anyone could find it.

The 29-page affidavit details the lengths some users went to in order to have their photos removed. One person, Jesse T., repeatedly attempted to get his photo removed and offered proof that he had been released from jail without being charged with a crime. Mugshots.com’s sister site unpublisharrest.com told him he would need to pay $400 to have his photo removed. After repeatedly protesting his innocence, a representative from the responded with expletives and told him his photo was permanent.

As of the time of this article’s writing, Mugshots.com remains online, but some are hopeful that the prosecution of the site’s owners will mark the beginning of the end for it and similar websites.

Topics
Eric Brackett
Eric Brackett
Former Digital Trends Contributor
You need an RTX 4090 to play Indiana Jones at max settings; AMD isn’t listed
Indiana drawing a circle in red.

The upcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is releasing on December 9, and Bethesda has just shared the hardware requirements for the game. What are we dealing with? Well, to say that you'll need one of the best graphics cards would be an understatement. If you want to play the new Indiana Jones at maximum settings, you'll need an RTX 4090 -- AMD cards aren't even listed as an option.

The latest Indiana Jones game is a real step up in terms of hardware requirements across the board. For starters, you need to have a hardware ray tracing GPU as a minimum requirement, and that will lock out all the people who are still running an older AMD card or an Nvidia GTX GPU, such as the GTX 1060 or GTX 1660 Super. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Read more
Two features from the new Kindle Scribe are coming to the older model
The back of the Amazon Kindle Scribe.

The Kindle Scribe, Amazon's e-reader with handwriting input, was updated this October along with three more Kindle models. Although the 2024 Scribe visually resembles the first-generation model from two years ago, the former offers better annotation features and AI summaries. With a recent update, Amazon is eliminating the gap between the two generations and bringing these features to the older model.

The older Kindle Scribe model recently received an update that added two new features, Good e-Reader reported. The additions include Active Canvas, which allows you to scribble notes anywhere on a book from your Kindle library, just like you would on a physical book. When you do so, your jottings appear in a resizable box, anchored to that part of the text, and stay there even when you resize the font. Previously, notes would appear on the top of a particular page, which could make things confusing if you had multiple comments referring to different sections of the page.

Read more
Asus’ latest monitor is a treat for both esports and AAA games
Asus ProArt monitors.

Asus has just announced several new monitors, some of which might end up on our list of the best gaming monitors next year. One of the more interesting picks is the ROG Strix XG32UCG, which lets you choose between 4K and 1080p depending on the game you want to play. There's also a new ProArt display with an impressive 6K panel that packs pixel density to the max at just 32 inches.

The ROG Strix piqued my interest. It's not Asus' first dual-mode monitor. We've already had the chance to review the ROG Swift PG32UCDP, which is also a dual-mode display, but it has brought some changes. For starters, the previous venture into adjustable refresh rate and resolution was an OLED monitor, and this one sports a Fast IPS panel.

Read more