[Eugene Volokh and Paul Alan Levy] Dozens of suspicious court cases, with missing defendants, aim at getting web pages taken down or deindexed

There are about 25 court cases throughout the country that have a suspicious profile:

• All involve allegedly self-represented plaintiffs, yet they have similar snippets of legalese that suggest a common organization behind them. (A few others, having a slightly different profile, involve actual lawyers.)
• All the ostensible defendants ostensibly agreed to injunctions being issued against them, which often leads to a very quick court order (in some cases, less than a week).
• Of these 25-odd cases, 15 give the addresses of the defendants — but a private investigator (Giles Miller of Lynx Insights & Investigations) couldn’t find a single one of the ostensible defendants at the ostensible address.

Now, you might ask, what’s the point of suing a fake defendant (to the extent that some of these defendants are indeed fake)? How can anyone get any real money from a fake defendant? How can anyone order a fake defendant to obey a real injunction?

The answer is that Google and various other Internet platforms have a policy: They won’t take down material (or, in Google’s case, remove it from Google indexes) just because someone says it’s defamatory. Understandable — why would these companies want to adjudicate such factual disputes? But if they see a court order that declares that some material is defamatory, they tend to take down or deindex the material, relying on the court’s decision.

Yet the trouble is that these Internet platforms can’t really know if the injunction was issued against the actual author of the supposed defamation — or against a real person at all. That’s why we have incidents like this:

1. Matthew Chan, a Georgia resident, posts a negative review of Mitul Patel, a Georgia dentist, on Yelp and a few other sites. (Readers may remember this story, which we blogged about in August; that’s the incident that got us investigating this issue.) Several months after Chan puts up his post, Yelp emails him, saying that it’s about to take his comment down because it received a court order that was issued against him, and the court concluded that his comment was defamatory.

But wait!, says Chan — he’s never been sued. And sure enough, the order is against a supposed Mathew Chan of Baltimore. As best we can tell, no such Mathew Chan exists in Baltimore, but in any event no Baltimorean is the author of the post. Yet the order is supposedly based on that Mathew Chan agreeing with Mitul Patel that the review was defamatory, and should be removed. (As we’ll see below, Mitul Patel and some of the other plaintiffs state that they did not authorize the lawsuit or sign the pleadings, though they did hire a “reputation management company” to do something.)

2. Steve Rhode, who lives in North Carolina, runs getoutofdebt.org, where he writes about (among other things) what he sees as abusive practices by debt relief firms. Over the past few years, he has criticized such companies, including two California companies called Financial Rescue and Rescue One Financial.

Over the past year and a month, three suits have been filed, in Rhode Island federal court, in Maryland state court, and in Florida state court, claiming that various comments on several separate posts defamed these debt relief companies. The Rhode Island case is part of the pattern we describe above; the other two cases are slightly different, in that they involve lawsuits brought by lawyers rather than by ostensibly self-represented plaintiffs.

Let’s focus for now on the suit in Rhode Island. The complaint objects to an allegedly defamatory comment that discussed Rescue One Financial, citing two blog posts, one of which is about Financial Rescue. But neither company sues Rhode, who might well have fought back.

Instead, a lawsuit is filed ostensibly on behalf of Bradley Smith — the chief executive of Rescue One Financial — against one Deborah Garcia, who supposedly lives in Rhode Island. As best we can tell, no-one by that name lives at the address given for her.

“Deborah Garcia” stipulates to a libel judgment, which the court promptly enters. The order is submitted to Google with a request to remove that page from Google indexes, so that no-one can find it using Google; Google complies.

3. A California newspaper writes a story in 2013 about an elementary school parent who had put fake signatures and falsely attributed quotes on a petition. (The petition was urging the school not to change its gifted education program.) The newspaper quotes