At the end of last week, a well-known domain investor, Sahar Sarid, was arrested in Florida. He and three others are charged with extortion and money laundering. The charges relate to the activity of Mugshots.com. The website's creators received information from various sources and posted the mugshots and arrest records, copied from public documents, of people arrested in the US. The subjects of the mugshots were then charged a $399 fee to have their photos and records “unpublished.” According to California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, such activities qualify as extortion. Many of the people affected were innocent of any crime and had been arrested by mistake and subsequently released without charge, Becerra said. However, having their data on Mugshots.com can significantly affect their ability to find a job, rent housing, or try to build relationships with others. The site collected over $2.4 million in removal fees, according to Becerra.
It was Sahar Sarid who registered the domain Mugshots.com, Domain Incite reported. However, Sarid claimed he had sold the domain back in 2012, but prosecutors now allege that the sale was fictitious and that he continued to collect money from the resource. Sahar Sarid made a dizzying career in the domain business in the early 2000s, and his name is often mentioned alongside those of such major domain investors as Frank Schilling and Rick Schwartz.
