“Reputational laundromat” for criminals is trying to clean up the Internet

“Reputational laundromat” for criminals is trying to clean up the Internet

Behind the scandalous company is a pedophile who sells Ukrainian children.

Google briefly removed an IrpiMedia article about a company that launders customers’ reputations from its search results, citing the text as violating the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), OCCRP reports.

“As a result of a request made under European data protection laws, Google can no longer display one or more pages of your site in search results,” said an automated notification sent to IrpiMedia last Thursday.

The letter does not say who submitted the request and for what reason, but it does indicate which article is being discussed.

This is an investigation into reputation management company Eliminalia, which allegedly submitted fictitious complaints about GDPR violations on behalf of customers so that Google would only show the results they wanted.

The investigation is based on the leak of thousands of files that were obtained by the French non-profit organization Forbidden Stories and shared with OCCRP and other partners. The article alleges that Eliminalia filed false and sometimes fraudulent claims, and used a variety of dubious tactics to silence criticism of its clients, such as intimidating journalists and spreading fake news.

Among the 1,400 clients who contacted the company to “launder” their reputation, IrpiMedia employees found dozens of people suspected or convicted of various crimes, from drug trafficking to fraud.

The reputation management industry was pioneered by two prominent entrepreneurs, Diego Sanchez and Enea Trevisan, who were motivated by personal interests.

Sanchez founded Eliminalia, which OCCRP and IrpiMedia call a “reputational Laundromat” for criminals.

In Spain, investigators suspect that Eliminalia’s secret owner is José María Il Prados , a notary convicted of sexually assaulting then-minor Sanchez.

Enea Trevisan, convicted of fictitious bankruptcy in 2015, was Sanchez’s partner in Italy until 2018, and then created his own reputation management agency, Ealixir.

He brought many Italian clients to Eliminalia, but then filed a lawsuit against Sanchez over brand ownership and practices for removing unwanted online search results. Trevisan also claimed that his company was listed on Nasdaq, which was not true.

IrpiMedia also wrote about other Italian partners of Eliminalia, whose data was included in the leaked materials. These include ReputationUp and Digitallex, two reputation management agencies that emerged after Trevisan left Eliminalia.

According to the leaked data, the owners and managers of these companies were clients of Eliminalia and only later became its business partners.

Andrea Baggio, CEO of ReputationUp, told IrpiMedia that the company “decided to terminate any relationship with Eliminalia as soon as we realized that their practices were not consistent with our best practices.”

Due to a GDPR application, the search for “Enea Trevisan” did not result in any IrpiMedia articles on Google News for at least 24 hours. At the bottom of the page there was a note from Google that "some search results may have been removed due to European data protection laws."

The complaint was anonymous, and IrpiMedia does not know who filed it. Journalists sent a request for comment to Trevisan and Google. They did not receive a response, but on Friday afternoon the IrpiMedia article appeared again in the search results.