Who are the corrupt Latin Americans who hired Eliminalia, the Spanish company that launders web reputations?

It is said that if something is published on the web, it exists forever. But the truth is a bit more complicated.

He realized that a few years ago Daniel Sanchez, a Mexican investigative journalist, when in August 2018 he started receiving text messages and calls asking him to take down an article he had published. They claimed to be lawyers.

The article in question, published in page 66 was an investigation into how the video surveillance company Interconecta, which had been hired by the governor of the state of Campeche, Mexico, had been linked to cases of corruption and tax evasion.

Years later, Sánchez received an email from a supposed marketing expert who went by the name Humberto Herrera Rincon Gallardowho said the research violated a European data law called GDPR and asked him to remove references to Altavista Group and its founder Ricardo Orrantia. When a month passed and the note was not removed, Gallardo returned, this time with a claim of copyright infringement.

Gallardo filed a complaint with digital oceanthe supplier of page 66, alleging that Sánchez illegally copied its content. To that end, it linked to a third-party site that had published a copy of Sánchez’s article, but with a falsified earlier publication date and a fake author: Humberto Herrera Rincón Gallardo, a coordinated six-month investigation reveals by the consortium. Forbidden Stories in which 30 European media participated and which focused on disinformation campaigns.

Thus, Sánchez was forced to delete his article.

as detailed Forbidden Stories This campaign was the work of Elimination a Spanish company contracted by Grupo Altavista which is in charge of reputation management and the offer content removal to private customers, to remove dozens of items. Gallardo denies any relationship with this company, and claims that his name was used without his knowledge or consent.

Orrantia hired Eliminalia and paid more than 12,000 euros in four installments to obtain their services and eliminate, among other things, Sánchez’s article.

Hundreds of journalists and bloggers around the world had their work deleted, modified or hidden from the internet between 2015 and 2021 by Eliminalia, he was able to discover. Forbidden Stories.

Eliminalia is protected in the “right to be forgotten”, a concept related to the protection of personal data (the right to privacy and honor) and the You have data, that is, the right of everyone to know, update and rectify all the information that concerns them and that is collected or stored in information centers. This company claims that its services remove “unwanted information and misinformation”, but internal documents have been leaked to Forbidden Stories tell another story: “The files show how Eliminalia worked to scammers, spyware companies, torturers, convicted felons, corrupt politicians and others from the global underworld to hide information of public interest.

Forbidden Stories and its partners investigated how Eliminalia – founded by Diego “Dídac” Sánchez – “manipulates online service providers, uses copyright laws as weapons to remove content and, in some cases, threatens and abuses journalists, with one objective: to bury the truth”.

1,500 customers have been identified in 50 countries on all continents, including Hernan Horacio Taricco Lavina doctor who allegedly ran a torture center during the Chilean dictatorship and who paid Eliminalia $5,900 de-index blog entries with titles such as “Doctors, Pinochetistas and Torturers”, among other articles; either Pedro Miguel shavesa union leader who was exposed in 2019 for signing lucrative contracts with two governors later arrested for corruption, and who paid Eliminalia 110,000 euro, requesting the removal of approximately 300 articles from the Internet.

In Latin America, more than 400 citizens and companies are customers of Eliminalia: Mexico (159 users), Colombia (73), Argentina (51) and Peru (32) top the list. Disbursement rates range from $500 to $427,584, depending on the complexity of the “work”.

Another mentioned is Majid Khalil Majzoub, a businessman close to Chavismo of Lebanese origin, to whom the regime of Nicolás Maduro awarded the company Lácteos los Andes in 2020. The United States withdrew his visa several years ago for alleged activities of money laundering and links with Islamic radicalism. Thus, Majzoub hired the Spanish firm in April 2018 to de-index the news on various portals.

isaac sultan there Maria Eugenia Baptista Zacarias They are two other Venezuelans with dark pasts who paid Eliminalia to remove information from the web. In the first case, $100,000; in the second, 30,000 (without specified currency).

Silvana RelationshipsThe former manager of a hotel owned by former Argentine presidents Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, died of cancer in 2018, but before that – in June 2017 – she had paid $2,100 to have four articles that mentioned her de-indexed. Diego Marynbergan Argentine-Israeli businessman whose name emerged in 2020 in a leak of 2,100 suspicious activity reports from banks sent to the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, paid $17,200 (currency unspecified) to de-index articles from different portals.

Eliminatia customers also include Ronald Oswaldo Caballero Cantero, a suspected drug trafficker who operated in Paraguay, who, before dying in an accident in 2017, signed with Eliminalia to remove information from the web.

Forbidden Stories identified several clients linked to organized crime, such as Malhas Tetruashviliconvicted of money laundering on behalf of a member of the Russian mafia, and Jose Mestrea well-known Spanish businessman turned cocaine trafficker.

Tord Lundström, CTO of Qurium, a Sweden-based non-profit organization that provides security services, began noticing Eliminalia’s model. I first sent deletion requests to individual journalists. When journalists resisted and did not accept the requests, Eliminalia went after web hosting providers. If that didn’t work, the next step was to “deindexation”, a strategy that involved tricking Google into hiding search terms from web results.

Reputation laundering companies like Eliminalia have started to exploit data protection laws, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

As described by the consortium of Forbidden Storiesthe strategy was simple: copying an article, posting it on a third-party website with a forged earlier date than the original, and claiming that the original article violated the DMCA because it violates “copyright.”

But the DMCA takedown requests were just one tool in a larger arsenal of tactics, he found. Forbidden storys. Many of the leaked documents include withdrawal requests that invoke the GDPR. Eliminalia also attempted to hide information they were unable to remove, for example by de-indexing.

Usually, but not always, these claims were sent by fake names and email addresses that falsify European or other legal institutions.

Eliminalia based its strategy on a network of fake portals. At first glance, They look like ordinary media. But on closer inspection we discover that these are specially designed to rehabilitate the image of their customers. These are scam sites with real appearance, like Le Monde France, London New Times, Uncensored London, Mayday Washington, Taiwan Times y CN NEWS today. They don’t exist, but they use names that merge with other established media.

How do you explain The Washington Postthe company took advantage of a flaw in the websites of dozens of US government agencies and universities, including Stanford University, to make fake news sites more legitimate to search engine algorithms.

SO, they buried the bad news under the fake news.

The case which best illustrates this situation is perhaps that of Hernan Gabriel Westman, accused in 2017 by Argentine federal authorities that this owner of an IT company operating in Buenos Aires and Miami was also the head of a major money laundering and drug trafficking operation for the infamous Sinaloa cartel in Mexico. Articles have flooded the web. Two years later, they dismissed the charges for insufficient evidence.

Westmann, paid 15,000 euros to Eliminalia. He said he had been “falsely accused” and “never had anything to do with drug trafficking”, and wanted Eliminalia services to remove negative stories about him from the web.

Soon, the first articles on Google linking him to a drug deal and a criminal case were replaced by fake news promoting Westmann as a commentator on a variety of topics, including Chihuahua traits, rules of football and the principles of philosophy.

Eliminatia Floods the web with thousands of fake and superficial articles from their customers so that Google considers them legitimate and gives them priority in the search engine before the originals.

“We erase your past,” promises the slogan on its website. This strategy, at least for a while, worked.