Someone Trying to Vanish Articles About Forged U.K. Court Order Aimed at Vanishing Article About Businessman Mason Soiza

I wrote in 2018 about a forged U.K. court order, quoting a Times (London) article (Billy Kenber):

Last week two fake documents were sent to Google in an attempt to censor a Times article revealing concerns about an online pharmacy run by an alleged internet spammer. The documents, including an order which purported to be from the UK Supreme Court, were sent to the tech giant in an attempt to get the article removed from its search result.

The “de-indexing” request was submitted in the name of Mason Soiza, 24, the owner of UK Meds, although he denied making the request. It comes amid concerns about how businesses, individuals and law firms are using takedown requests to remove damaging information from searches. At least 75 fake court documents have been sent to Google, according to a US academic….

Mr Soiza, who has emailed The Times to ask for the newspaper to “de-index” the article about him, said he had not created the forged documents or submitted them to Google. He said they were “100 per cent not sent by me” and added that they “look awful”.

He said he had hired a company called DeIndex to “clear my name” and offered £6,000 if it succeeded in “removing false information about me online” but he did not know anything about its methods. Someone claiming to represent DeIndex on the company’s Skype account said that it had not made any submissions to Google or created the documents.

Now six copyright-based takedown requests (see here, here, here, here, here, and here) have been sent to Google, aimed at getting Google to deindex my post (and other articles about Soiza and some other, unrelated, articles); the claim is that the posts infringe an X post that is completely unrelated to my article. Two other requests (see here and, from last year, here) have sought to deindex some other items about Soiza, but didn’t include my post.

It’s impossible for me to tell who is responsible for deindexing requests, but I thought it was noteworthy that there was an attempt to vanish those items from search results. As best I can tell, the attempt was unsuccessful.

I e-mailed what appear to be Soiza’s new company to ask whether he had a statement on the matter, and got the response that, “We’ve looked into the matter and don’t have a statement to provide at this time.”