Special Report: A network of fake news sites is one of the several tools that Spain-based firm Eliminalia uses to manipulate online information on behalf of a global roster of clients, a Washington Post investigation found.
, a Paris-based consortium of investigative journalists that pursues the work of assassinated and threatened reporters and editors worldwide. The investigation was inspired by the work of Gauri Lankesh, an editor fatally shot in 2017, a time when she was reporting on disinformation and political extremism in India. This project involved more than 100 journalists from 30 news organizations, including The Washington Post, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, Haaretz and El País.
Such companies are often called “black hat” firms because they use deceptive or legally dubious tactics. Cutts and other experts said they would put Eliminalia in that group.“They are clearly using black-hat techniques,” said Zach Edwards, a data privacy researcher who reviewed The Post’s findings. “It’s unethical and may even be illegal in some cases.”, but the internal documents examined by The Post and its partnersprovide the most comprehensive account of its tactics to date.
The contracts do not spell out Eliminalia’s techniques, and how much the firm tells its customers is unclear.Burying bad news under fake news In an interview, Westmann said that he was “falsely charged” and that he “never had anything to do with narcotrafficking.” He said he agreed to pay Eliminalia 15,000 euros, roughly equivalent to that amount in dollars, to remove the negative stories about him from the web.
Westmann acknowledged to The Post that the firm created “fake stories” about him in an effort to drown out the negative headlines, but he said Eliminalia did so without his permission. He provided The Post with an email he sent Sánchez last year saying he was withholding partial payment because Eliminalia had not removed all the fake stories.the 600 fake news websites to Eliminalia’s parent company, Maidan Holding, according to Tord Lundstrom, Qurium’s technical director.
Eliminalia provided similar services to the Italian spyware company Area SpA, which in 2014 agreed to pay the U.S. Commerce Department $100,000 to settle charges it improperly sold U.S.-made spyware components to Syria. Fake news sites that are part of Eliminalia’s network prominently feature the company’s name in stories about the martial art sambo and a dance school.
It’s not clear who posted the links to the fake news sites. But experts said it appeared to be an attempt to trick search engine algorithms into interpreting the links as referrals from an academic institution. The Quinsigamond forum was closed to the public in October, and the posted links were removed, the college, known as QCC, said in a statement.
Although there was no way to tell from the notices, they were crafted by Eliminalia in a bid to remove stories critical of executives of the charity, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, or IFCJ, Eliminalia’s internal records show. Ungurean’s two blog posts, one from 2015 and the other from 2018, were both titled “Why Christians should Not Give Money to Rabbi Eckstein of IFCJ.” The 2018 post showed up as the fifth result when an Eliminalia employee searched on Yahoo for the term “Yael Eckstein Salary” on Oct. 13, 2020, according to a screenshot of the results.
Such fraudulent copyright-infringement complaints are Eliminalia’s go-to tactic for getting material removed from the web, according to the internal records. CBH said in a statement through its attorney that it had hired ReputationUP and was not aware of, and did not authorize, any work Eliminalia may have done as a subcontractor. “CBH has never tolerated that any illegal actions be taken on its behalf by anyone,” the attorney wrote. “If ReputationUp is found to have failed in its duties, CBH will react strongly to what would be an intolerable situation that it will firmly condemn.
webpages that are marked “eliminated” after the firm filed a DMCA complaint; The Post checked dozens of those pages and found that they no longer exist. Bogus DMCA complaints can be particularly effective with small news organizations, independent journalists and bloggers who may lack the resources to fight them, experts said.
Automattic told Ungurean that it could not determine whether her account had been hacked because the company does not retain detailed data, such as the location of a log-in, after 30 days. In January 2021, after facing sexual misconduct allegations, the reality-TV personality and former model Carter Oosterhouse hired Eliminalia, personally signing an agreement and paying the firm 3,000 euros, or about $3,200, according to the company records. Oosterhouse had gained fame as the star carpenter on HGTV’s home improvement show “Trading Spaces.”in 2017 of repeatedly coercing her years earlier to perform oral sex.
Eliminalia’s internal records show it also sent a privacy complaint citing the same law, the California Consumer Privacy Act, to the parent company of the Hollywood Reporter, Penske Media Corp. It was signed by a “Tony Edison” in Brussels. When The Post did the same search Eliminalia did in 2021, the results included no record of the Hollywood Reporter article.Eliminalia filed privacy complaints under fake names on behalf of other people, including the California biotech entrepreneur and the traveling circus clown, the records show.
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