Eugene Volokh and Paul Levy of The Volokh Conspiracy discuss a new way to game the legal system:
There are about 25 court cases throughout the country that have a suspicious profile:
- All involve allegedly self-represented plaintiffs, yet they have similar snippets of legalese that suggest a common organization behind them. (A few others, having a slightly different profile, involve actual lawyers.)
- All the ostensible defendants ostensibly agreed to injunctions being issued against them, which often leads to a very quick court order (in some cases, less than a week).
- Of these 25-odd cases, 15 give the addresses of the defendants — but a private investigator (Giles Miller of Lynx Insights & Investigations) couldn’t find a single one of the ostensible defendants at the ostensible address.
Now, you might ask, what’s the point of suing a fake defendant (to the extent that some of these defendants are indeed fake)? How can anyone get any real money from a fake defendant? How can anyone order a fake defendant to obey a real injunction?
They go on to explain that by filing and winning a libel suit against someone who doesn’t exist, but who authored a libelous comment, those who want to erase stories from Google can show Google that judgment, and Google will remove the story from its indexes.
A later blog post indicates that these filings are being dismissed:
And Monday evening I learned that yet another pending case that shares the same pattern — similar procedural strategy, similar language in the documents, similar lack of any connection between the ostensible defendant and the ostensible defendant’s address in any public records — had been voluntarily dismissed, on the day that Paul Alan Levy and I put up our post on the subject. That case is Carter v. Quinn, filed in Florida state court, and it seems to have been an attempt to get Google to deindex a Charleston Post & Courier article about a sex crime arrest (though note that the arrest might not have led to a conviction). The article went up in January 2014, but then in July 2016 a comment was posted to the article. (The comment has been deleted in the past few weeks, but the people at the Post & Courier assure me that it wasn’t deleted by them.)
The infinite plasticity of the Web will let digital crimes pop up and disappear like the virtual particles of physicists.
Did anything like this happen before the Web?
