By Phineas Rueckert
armando.info
Leaked documents obtained by ‘Forbidden Stories’ for the series ‘Story Killers’ unveil the inner workings of this Spanish company. It is one of the most established and daring firms in the global online reputation management market—a euphemism for burying the truth on the internet—resorting to cyber tools, legal tricks, and intimidation against journalists and media outlets. Eliminalia offers its clientele, which includes prominent figures from organized crime and corruption—including Venezuelans—the ability to hide or suppress negative mentions online.
In August 2018, Daniel Sánchez, a Mexican investigative journalist, started receiving peculiar phone calls and text messages regarding a recent article he had published. According to Sánchez, the messages, which came weekly, were from people claiming to be lawyers asking him to retract his article.
Sánchez is a journalist at Página 66, a small investigative news outlet in the southern Mexican state of Campeche. In January 2018, he published an investigation into what he termed the “poor track record” of a surveillance company, Interconecta, which had been hired by the state governor. While digging into financial audit records, Sánchez uncovered that the company, a subsidiary of the multinational tech firm Grupo Altavista, was linked to corruption and tax fraud cases.
About two years after Sánchez’s article was published, he received an even stranger request. An email sent by a supposed local marketing expert who called himself Humberto Herrera Rincón Gallardo claimed that Sánchez’s article infringed on a European data law known as GDPR and asked him to remove references to Grupo Altavista and its founder, Ricardo Orrantia. The email was signed by the European Compliance Department.
Perplexed, Sánchez consulted with Article 19, a press freedom advocacy organization, which advised him not to retract the piece.
However, a month later, Gallardo returned. This time, he attempted a new tactic: a copyright infringement lawsuit. In January 2020, Gallardo filed a DMCA claim with Digital Ocean, the hosting provider for Página 66 in the United States. The claim alleged that Sánchez had illegally copied his content. For evidence, Gallardo linked to a third-party site that had published a replica of Sánchez’s article but with a fabricated earlier publication date and also a made-up author: Humberto Herrera Rincón Gallardo.
The company, based in Barcelona, Spain, claims to have offices in 10 countries. It has clients worldwide. Screenshot from eliminalia.com
This time, the strategy worked. Digital Ocean ordered Sánchez to remove his article from the Página 66 site or it would be taken down. Sánchez appealed to Digital Ocean but was unsuccessful. Eventually, fearing he would lose his readers and his livelihood as a journalist, he capitulated and took down the article. Digital Ocean did not respond to requests for comment for this report.
In Mexico, one of the most dangerous countries for journalists, copyright claims do not seem as drastic as the lethal threats faced by Sánchez’s colleagues, but the effect is the same. “It means there is a subtle form of censorship,” Sánchez said in an interview with Forbidden Stories.
However, it turns out this campaign was orchestrated not by local lawyers or marketing experts. According to documents obtained by Forbidden Stories, Grupo Altavista hired Eliminalia—a Spanish reputation management firm that provides content removal services for private clients—to suppress dozens of articles linked to the company’s name and its founder, including Sánchez’s piece.
Gallardo, the marketing expert whose name appears in the DMCA complaint, denied ever being “an employee of Eliminalia or any company related to Eliminalia.” He told Forbidden Stories, “The use of my name in the case opened against the Página 66 portal was completely improper and without my knowledge or consent,” he said.
Sánchez was one of hundreds of journalists, bloggers, and newsrooms worldwide whose work was erased, altered, or hidden from the internet between 2015 and 2021 by Eliminalia, as discovered by Forbidden Stories and its partners. Armando.info, a partner in Venezuela on the Story Killers project, has also been targeted by Eliminalia with its tactics.
Eliminalia claims that its services help delete “undesired or incorrect contents” for clients with a “right to be forgotten,” but nearly 50,000 internal documents leaked to Forbidden Stories contradict this version. The files show how Eliminalia worked for scammers, spyware companies, torturers, convicted criminals, corrupt politicians, and other members of the global underworld to hide information of public interest. Previous reports, including the ones from Rest of World—a non-profit organization studying trends in the use of new technologies in journalism—have revealed some of Eliminalia’s clients, but this leak, which also includes confidential emails, client names, contracts, and other legal documents, offers a fuller understanding of the opaque company’s operations.
A promotional dossier from Eliminalia for its clients details some of its services
Eliminalia declined to comment for this report. In a letter to Forbidden Stories, a French law firm representing Eliminalia stated that a one-week deadline to respond to our questions was “too short for a real respect of the adversarial process” and that most of the “questions demonstrate a biased and dishonorable approach,” and “refer to trade secrets.” Forbidden Stories extended the deadline by a week but received no response from the company. The consortium and its Story Killers partners also reached out to all Eliminalia clients mentioned in this article, none of whom responded.
How billionaires worldwide use deception to disappear their dark past from the Internet
Over six months, Forbidden Stories analyzed these documents under the Story Killers project, a global investigation into mercenaries of disinformation that originated from the work of murdered Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh, involving 100 journalists from 30 media outlets. Through dozens of interviews with former employees, clients, data protection experts, and victims, Forbidden Stories and its partners investigated how this company manipulates online service providers, uses copyright laws to eliminate content, and in some cases, threatens and abuses journalists, all with a single aim: to bury the truth.
Forbidden Stories identified Eliminalia clients in 50 countries across all five continents. The leak of approximately 1,500 current and former clients includes details of Eliminalia’s dealings with a physician who allegedly ran a torture center during Chile’s dictatorship and was convicted of homicide; the former CEO of Banca Privada d’Andorra, accused of money laundering for corrupt Venezuelan officials; and a Brazilian businessman involved in a global prostitution network, among others.
Forbidden Stories also investigated the extensive business empire linked to Eliminalia’s founder, Diego Dídac Sánchez. Spanish commercial registers show that between 2020 and 2021, Eliminalia recorded sales worth around 2.7 million euros. However, this investigation uncovered that Sánchez and his partner, José María Hill Prados, also run at least 54 companies across nine jurisdictions, including a surrogacy company currently facing litigation for child trafficking.
The Business of Burying the Truth
Back in Mexico, documents obtained by Forbidden Stories show that in April 2019, Ricardo Orrantia—the owner of Grupo Altavisa—hired Eliminalia to request the removal of content under “current legislation on personal data protection.” In total, Orrantia requested the removal of 13 journalistic articles from Mexican media, including Sánchez’s, and three Google search result terms related to his name, his wife, and Grupo Altavista. He paid over 12,000 euros in four installments to Eliminalia.
Orrantia was one of over 150 Mexican clients listed in the leaked documents. Others include Pedro Miguel Haces Barba, a union leader exposed in 2019 for signing lucrative contracts with two governors later arrested for corruption, and Miguel Ángel Colorado Cessa, the brother of a drug trafficker from the Zetas cartel.
Eliminalia’s clients paid substantial sums to erase their digital past. Haces Barba paid 110,000 euros, requesting the removal of about 300 articles from the internet. Romain Girbal, a French businessman whose “responsible” mining company, AMR Bauxite, was accused of tax evasion in 2020, paid 155,000 euros. Another client—a Argentinian-Israeli banker accused of laundering money for Hugo Chávez’s regime—paid nearly 400,000 euros.
Under Sánchez and Hill Prados’ direction, Eliminalia also sought to establish itself in new markets. According to the company’s website, it has offices in over a dozen countries, including Italy, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States. In Latin America, Eliminalia has—or has had—offices in the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Mexico.
Diego Didac Sánchez, founder of Eliminalia, leads at least 54 companies alongside his partner José María Hill Prados. Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/ Salimu 11.
Forbidden Stories identified multiple clients linked to organized crime, including Malchas Tetruashvili, convicted for money laundering on behalf of a Russian mafia member, and José Mestre, a well-known Spanish businessman turned cocaine trafficker.
“Legitimate uses of this kind of reputation management are scarce compared to the advantages for the corrupt,” explains Emma Briant, a Bard College researcher in New York who studies information warfare, to Forbidden Stories. “There are many companies specialized in this kind of thing. And I think it’s really harmful because it is often very difficult for people to locate truly reliable information because it’s simply no longer visible,” Briant said.
“Chilling Effect”
In November 2020, Tord Lundström, technical director of Qurium, a non-profit organization based in Sweden that provides security services, including web hosting to dozens of independent media outlets, opened an email from a lawyer named Raúl Soto. Soto claimed to represent the European Commission, its executive body.
Lundström—a tech enthusiast with corporate data protection experience—found the email unusual and began to investigate. After an internal inquiry, Lundström traced the email back to Eliminalia and mapped the company’s digital infrastructure. He discovered that Soto was not a real person but a pseudonym used by an Eliminalia employee based in Ukraine. He realized that Eliminalia aimed not only at websites hosted by Qurium but also requested large-scale content removals. “For us, it was like: ‘Oh my God, this is a new power play because we can’t do anything about it,’” he said, referring to the elusive tactics employed by this company and similar ones.
Lundström began to see a pattern emerging. At first, Eliminalia sent takedown requests to individual journalists. When journalists began responding, they turned to hosting providers. If this didn’t work, they moved to de-indexing, a black hat marketing strategy to trick Google into hiding specific search terms from web results.
Eliminalia and other companies realized that legal loopholes in data protection laws could be exploited as a weapon to eliminate content from the internet. Two data protection laws—the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—were easily manipulable.
Passed in 1998, the DMCA amended the U.S. Copyright Act. Adam Holland, Project Director at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society in Massachusetts, explained that the DMCA, a byproduct of the early days of the internet, aimed to facilitate the removal of copyright-protected content appearing on streaming sites like The Pirate Bay and LimeWire in subsequent years. The DMCA allowed companies like Disney to remove content infringing copyright, Holland explained to reporters. They only had to send a copyright claim to the infringing site and request its removal. If the infringing site did not take it down, the company, as the legitimate owner, could sue the site and its hosting provider.
Reputation laundering firms like Eliminalia quickly realized this law could benefit their own ends. And those of their clients.
Their strategy was simple: copy an article, publish it on a third-party site—either a blog or a fake website—with a false earlier publication date, and claim that the original article infringed the DMCA. “It’s much easier than going to court. It’s much easier than finding some [journalist] and hitting them with a wrench: ‘We’ll just send a copyright notice,’” Holland quips.
In 2002, concerned researchers founded the Lumen database, a repository of DMCA takedowns, worried that this legal loophole could be used to curb free speech. Today, Lumen, which Holland directs, has amassed over 25 million takedown requests and currently receives over 7,000 each day through agreements with hosting providers.
Holland states that takedown requests increased “rapidly and steadily” around 2012 for various reasons, including automation technologies that enabled bulk DMCA claims. “I guarantee you that when they drafted the DMCA, they did not foresee that there would be enormous networks of Eastern European bot armies creating fake newspaper websites to obliterate criticism,” he asserted.
According to Shreya Tiwari, a Lumen researcher studying DMCA abuses, fraudulent requests are not always successful, but they are often used in conjunction with other threats to intimidate journalists into removing content. In a big data study, she found that more than 400 articles had been illegitimately removed from the internet using this tactic, illustrating a “chilling effect.”
However, at Eliminalia, as Forbidden Stories found, DMCA takedown requests were merely a tool in a broader arsenal of tactics. The leaked documents include hundreds of takedown requests invoking the GDPR, a European data law designed to protect personal data. Eliminalia also attempted to conceal information it could not remove, for example, through de-indexing.
“We actively fight against fraudulent takedown attempts using a combination of automated and human review to detect signs of abuse,” a Google spokesperson said regarding this matter, adding: “We provide extensive transparency regarding these removals to hold requesters accountable, and sites can file counter-notifications for us to review again if they believe content has been removed from our results in error.”
Generally speaking, though not always, these legal and DMCA claims were sent using fake names, like Raúl Soto, and email addresses impersonating European institutions or other legal entities. In a statement, a European Commission official said that “CERT-UE and the Commission are not aware of any other domain names impersonating EU institutions related to this specific case,” adding: “The existence of a domain name is not an infringement; its use to falsely impersonate is.”
Call Me by My (Other) Name
In July 2022, the online message board for the Black Student Union at Quinsigamond Community College (QCC) in Massachusetts became flooded with spam. Someone had posted an open forum link with a brand logo, and a guest account began erratically responding. Within hours, the account had posted 7,000 comments.
These comments concealed a digital atomic bomb. Each comment contained hundreds of links known as “open redirects.” These links seem to initially direct traffic to legitimate websites, like Stanford University or NASA. However, they are designed to travel instantly from these real sites to illegitimate ones, exploiting a bug in site infrastructure.
It turned out that the thousands of comments in the Black Student Union forum were redirected to a network of fake websites created to launder the reputations of Eliminalia’s clients, as uncovered by Forbidden Stories. In total, the guest account published over two million unique links. To Google’s algorithm, it looked like the linked websites had suddenly received a traffic spike. The algorithm, in turn, propelled those results to the top of search results, effectively hiding the real results by pushing them down in ranking. A Google spokesperson claimed that generating backlinks didn’t guarantee improved search ranking.
In October, QCC discovered and removed the fraudulent account and eliminated the link from the message board, while also tightening cybersecurity. “It is incredibly disheartening that these ‘false actors’ online can use reputable academic institutions like QCC to help propagate misinformation. This goes against the essence of higher education, which values open dialogue, honesty, truth, and knowledge,” stated QCC President Luis G. Pedraja, Ph.D., in a statement to Forbidden Stories and its partners. “In today’s society, as technology advances, these nefarious companies find new ways to attack the innocent.”
This strategy, at least for a time, worked. Suddenly, searching for the name Víctor Bayona Viedma brought up articles about his new poetry collection before accusations that this individual allegedly tortured two detainees in Spain. The name Gabriel Hernán Westmann brought articles about a Chihuahua expert, not about a pilot accused of working with drug cartels (who later had all charges dropped). According to several prominent Google search results, Andrea Formenti from the company Area S.P.A invented a foldable phone, even though this Italian firm has a history of selling surveillance equipment to the Libyan government.
“If all you have to do is learn to trick Google to fix all your reputation problems, that’s going to be a problem,” said Katharine Trendacosta, associate director of policy and activism at the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), an NGO based in San Francisco, California, covering issues of electronic surveillance and privacy.
“While there are bad actors attempting to manipulate search engine rankings, Google designs its systems to rank high-quality information at the top of search results and to combat spam and malicious behaviors,” a Google spokesperson told Forbidden Stories. “We do everything we can to protect our search results from manipulation, and we have been successfully combating well-known spam tactics like link spamming for years.”
Qurium’s investigation, exclusively shared with the consortium, identified 622 websites that Eliminalia appeared to use to launder the reputation of its clients. These websites, with names like CNN News Today, London Uncensored, Mayday Washington, and Taiwan Times, were created by an offshore company called Communication Media Group. Qurium was able to link this company to Maidan Holdings, the Miami-based holding company that owns Eliminalia. The websites share IP infrastructure and other technical elements like copyright pages, suggesting that they were created by the same individual or group.
Analyzing the content of these websites, Qurium identified around 3,350 articles mentioning Eliminalia clients, generally presented positively. To make these websites appear legitimate, Eliminalia also published stolen content from legitimate media. “It’s a bit disheartening,” states Lena Corot, a former journalist for the French tech site Usine Digital, whose article was copied and posted on one of these fake sites: lemonde-france.fr.
The technical investigation by Qurium aligns with other reports from the consortium, which discovered that Eliminalia offered clients the placement of fake articles.
In a 2019 email obtained by Forbidden Stories and its partners, an Eliminalia employee told a client that the company planned to publish “neutral or positive” articles about an imagined character—crafted as distinguished in their profession—who had the same name as the client. The employee wrote that they hoped the proposed articles would reach the top search results for the client’s name.
“It’s a new and nice definition of censorship,” Lundström said.
Infodio: Is Banca Zarattini submitting a false GDPR request through Eliminalia?
Think Bad (and Big) and You’ll Succeed
In his 2016 autobiography, The Secret of Success, Eliminalia’s founder, Dídac Sánchez, reveals his mantra: “Think big and you’ll be great.”
In the years since founding Eliminalia in 2013, Sánchez has followed his own advice and established a global network of companies. By reviewing financial records, Forbidden Stories and its partners identified around 90 companies across nine jurisdictions related to Sánchez and his partner, Hill Prados. Most of these companies are registered under the Miami-based holding company, Maidan Holdings. Several of Maidan’s companies, including World Intelligence Ltd and World Reputation, also offered political consulting services, according to previous reports and archived websites.
In an undercover operation, Colombian journalists from La FM—not part of this project—discovered that Eliminalia offered to conduct political campaigns in Colombia, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic through one of its subsidiaries. Several sources stated to Forbidden Stories and its partners that Eliminalia had also been involved in hacking, but these claims could not be verified.
Not all of Sánchez and Hill Prados’ companies operated in the reputation management space. Subrogalia Ukraine and PP Interfiv Ltd., two surrogacy companies owned by Sánchez and Hill Prados, were investigated by Ukrainian authorities for child trafficking, as uncovered by Forbidden Stories. Despite these accusations, Eliminalia continued to expand during the pandemic, opening operations in Ukraine (When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the company moved its headquarters to Tbilisi, Georgia).
In addition to deletion or de-indexing, they offer the service of creating positive notes for their clients. Screenshot from eliminalia.com
Experts who spoke with Forbidden Stories noted that while Eliminalia is not the only company in the reputation management industry, it is perhaps one of the most established. “This is clearly an old and sophisticated company. They have been doing this for a long time,” says Holland from Lumen.
However, as Eliminalia has grown, so has the reputation management market. “There’s a whole array of professional service industries, like public relations agents, lobbying groups, lawyers, etc., that basically help unpleasant people, companies, and governments turn into internationally respected entrepreneurs and cosmopolitan philanthropic figures,” says Tena Prelec, a researcher at the University of Oxford in the UK studying the reputation management industry.
For many journalists and press freedom advocates who spoke to Forbidden Stories, holding these actors accountable often felt like a Sisyphean task.
In the days following the removal of his article, Sánchez from Página 66 investigated legal avenues to restore his content. He contacted Article 19 and Media Defence, a UK-based press freedom advocacy organization.
However, reversing a fraudulent DMCA claim is not easy. First, a “counter-notification” must be filed. These claims often lead to protracted legal battles, which can be costly and time-consuming. Sánchez would have to appear in an Arizona court, a cost neither he nor the organizations could afford. “If we had legal support, we would go for it,” Sánchez said. “That’s what we want: for the information to remain on the page.”
Even if he won the case and republished the article, the only reward he would receive for the time lost under the DMCA would be the attorney’s fees.
Bet You Can’t See Me
Since Forbidden Stories contacted Eliminalia several weeks ago for comments, the company seems to have erased its own trace on the internet. In January, the same fake news sites that Forbidden Stories and Qurium confirmed were linked to Maidan Holdings—likely created to polish the reputation of Eliminalia’s clients—had been modified. However, tracking the now-modified websites still reveals a link: one of the new copyright pages was tied to Mariia Ladovchyna, Eliminalia’s technical director. Although this trace is insufficient to link the entire network of fake sites to Eliminalia, it indicates that the company may have played a role in their creation.
Then, about a month before this publication, Eliminalia appears to have committed its final act of disappearance: it also changed its identity. At the entrance of the coworking office in Barcelona that once housed Eliminalia, it now reads: “Idata Protection.” The company files reviewed by Forbidden Stories confirm the rebranding, likely due to negative press generated by journalist and investigator inquiries. But when two members of the consortium visited the office, an employee stated: “The company is called Idata Protection, but we belong to Eliminalia.” Sánchez, the founder, was no longer in Barcelona, according to the employee.
The rebranding coincides with the company’s narrative. Eliminalia is an expert in “creating problems and then solving them,” according to a source familiar with the company.
Even though they changed their name to Idata Protection, they are still, in practice, Eliminalia. Credit: Antonio Baquero / OCCRP / Story Killers.
Shawn Boburg (Washington Post), Kira Zalan (OCCRP), Lilia Saúl Rodríguez (OCCRP), David Pegg (The Guardian), and Joaquín Gil (El País) contributed to this investigation.
Semanario El Venezolano. Madrid, from August 3 to August 16, 2022