“We erase your past” declares the company’s tagline. Eliminalia, which has offices in several cities including Barcelona and Kyiv, is part of a growing industry that will clean up your online profile. Officially the company performs “a deep search across the internet for all information – whether it be an article, a blog, social media posts or even a mistaken identity”. It then endeavours, on behalf of its clients, to get any negative information removed, reports The Guardian.
Damaging content
The Guardian, however, found that over several years, the company deployed unethical or deceptive methods to scrub unwanted and damaging content from the internet.
These included impersonating third parties, such as media organisations, and filing fake copyright complaints to search engines such as Google to get information taken down. In other cases, it would bury negative articles under a deluge of fluffy stories about dogs, cars and football.
Eliminalia’s services are revealed in a cache of 50,000 internal files that show how the company worked for a host of clients around the world. Many were individuals simply wanting an embarrassing or traumatic incident in their past to cease haunting them online.
But the firm’s clients also included those accused or convicted of criminal offences, including drug smugglers, fraudsters, petty criminals and at least one sex offender.
Eliminalia’s website says it primarily gets results using the EU’s “right to be forgotten”, which can be used legitimately by criminals to request the removal of references to their convictions when it can reasonably be claimed that they have moved on from their crime.
The files provide a fascinating insight into reputation management firms willing to draw on dubious means to clean up a client’s reputation online.
It is unclear whether Eliminalia’s clients knew of the methods it used.
The files were shared with the Guardian by Forbidden Stories, a French nonprofit whose mission is to pursue the work of assassinated, threatened or jailed reporters. It has coordinated a global investigation into disinformation.
About Didac
Founded in 2013 by 30-year-old Diego “Didac” Sanchez, Eliminalia built a catalogue of clients across 50 countries. Between 2015 and 2021 it worked for more than 1,500 individuals and businesses, according to the leaked files, which include emails, contracts, client details, fake legal letters and copies of negative articles about the firm’s clients.
Clients includea Swiss bank accused of infringing money-laundering regulation, a slum landlord convicted in the UK of dozens of offences relating to shockingly derelict properties, a Turkish biotech tycoon charged with hiring a hitman to murder a business associate and a Venezuelan businessman implicated in tax evasion linked to works of art.
Clients appear to have been charged up to €100,000, although most paid a few thousand dollars for a one-off service.
Eliminalia did not respond in detail to repeated requests for comment. Its lawyers said: “The orientation and content of the vast majority of the questions demonstrate a partial and dishonourable approach.”
Several of Eliminalia’s clients did, however, answer questions about the company’s work.
One was Hernán Gabriel Westmann, who was accused by Argentinian authorities in 2017 of having laundered money for the Sinaloa drug cartel. The charges were dismissed by judges two years later, citing insufficient evidence.
Westmann told the Washington Post, one of the consortium’s partners, that the charges against him had been brought by the government of Mauricio Macri as retaliation for having done business with Macri’s leftwing predecessor, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
He said he had been able to persuade Argentinian media to remove articles about him but turned to Eliminalia for help with foreign press reports that he considered to be inaccurate.
Westmann now appears in articles pontificating about the rules of American football, the application of philosophy to daily life, and the “natural arrogance” of chihuahuas – published on sites that appear to be linked to Eliminalia’s parent company.
Westmann said that he did not know how Eliminalia removed articles, and that he was unaware of any spam.
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Source: The Guardian
