Eliminalia: a reputation laundromat for criminals

Spanish reputation management company’s hacking tactics help criminals around the world erase the past

Two of them were convicted of drug trafficking. One was charged with laundering money from prostitution. Another sold US equipment to the Syrian government. Three more have been charged with facilitating a cryptocurrency scam that resulted in billions of dollars being stolen from investors.

These are just some of the more than 1,400 clients, including dozens of convicted or suspected criminals, who have hired Eliminalia, a reputation management company that promises to “erase your past.”

Barcelona-based Eliminalia has been in the business of reputation laundering for a decade. From a wood-paneled co-working space on the historic Portal de l’Angel shopping street, which it shares with two dozen other tenants, the company has grown into a significant player in the global hiring misinformation industry.

Officially behind Eliminalia is Diego “Didak” Jimenez Sanchez, a 30-year-old Spanish entrepreneur believed to be based in Georgia. Sanchez claims to control a vast network of companies, including a Ukrainian surrogacy business that is under investigation for trafficking in babies.

Daniel Sanchez

But it looks like he built this network with a man named Jose Maria Hill Prados, who was convicted of sexually abusing him when he was a minor. Although Hill Prados’s name does not appear on Eliminalia’s records, Spanish investigators suspect that he may also be controlling the reputation manager.

Thousands of leaked files, obtained by French nonprofit Forbidden Stories and shared with OCCRP and dozens of partners, have allowed reporters to map Eliminalia’s vast network of digital influence. Based on previous reports, the documents provide unprecedented insight into the myriad of behind-the-scenes tactics the company uses to quell criticism from its customers.

Records show Eliminalia, which changed its name to iData Protection SL in late December, used copyright and privacy laws to intimidate journalists, manipulated search engines to hide information, and spread fake news. In some countries, the company has even opened new businesses with its criminal clients.

Experts say Eliminalia is part of a growing disinformation industry that helps miscreants, from criminals to kleptocrats, hide their dark past.

“The whole mechanism, this money laundering and reputation commission, this day-to-day kleptocracy, depends today on transnational professional intermediaries,” said Tena Prelec, a fellow at Oxford University who studies transnational kleptocracies.

Eliminalia’s lawyers declined to answer questions about the project, arguing that many of them concerned business secrets of the company’s clients. They accused journalists of bias. “The direction and content of the vast majority of questions show a piecemeal and dishonest approach,” they write.

What is the Eliminalia leak?

Nearly 50,000 documents from reputation management company Eliminalia were leaked to French nonprofit Forbidden Stories and shared with dozens of media partners. Over 100 reporters worked together to investigate the disinformation-for-hire industry as part of the Story Killers project.

The data contains detailed information about Eliminalia’s clients in 50 countries around the world, including their names, contracts signed by them and other legal documents.

For the first time, journalists were given a look at the activities of one of the world’s most important so-called “black-hat” (hacker) reputation management companies.

Service for criminals

Sanchez, who introduced himself as a self-employed entrepreneur, was only 20 years old when he founded his first reputation management company in Spain. In the following years, he opened several other offices, eventually moving to Ukraine, where he hired people to write fake reviews and legal notices for journalists.

Among Sanchez’s many ventures was the surrogacy business Subrogalia, which connected Spanish parents with Ukrainian women who could carry their children. Although he is the company’s public face, documents obtained by OCCRP show that its Ukrainian business was actually owned by Hill Prados, who was jailed in Spain for sexually abusing Sanchez as a minor.

Two Spanish law enforcement officials in charge of cyberthreats, who asked not to be named because they were not allowed to communicate with the media, told OCCRP they suspect Hill-Prados is a beneficiary of Eliminalia. However, they did not provide details or evidence, and OCCRP was unable to independently verify this claim.

Eliminalia is part of a network of at least 54 companies in nine jurisdictions that have been associated with Hill Prados and Sanchez in the past decade. None of them agreed to comment on this story.

Sanchez has previously said that he created Eliminalia out of a desire to erase stories of his past as a victim of Hill Prados.

Part of Eliminalia’s business also serves ordinary people seeking to erase harmful material posted about them online, as part of a growing trend to strengthen “right to be forgotten” laws. But reporters found that many of the clients in the reputation manager’s records were criminals who hired Eliminalia to manipulate those same laws to their advantage.

Leaked internal documents show Eliminalia has provided services to more than 1,400 clients, including hundreds of people who have been charged or convicted of crimes ranging from drug trafficking and sexual assault to fraud and money laundering.

– Italian company Area SpA paid Eliminalia at least €100,000 to remove 72 media reports that it had been fined in the US for illegally supplying equipment to the sanctioned Syrian government. Shortly after Area and Eliminalia signed on, articles from everything from K-Pop to blockchain flooded the internet, drowning out and sidelining news reports about Area’s relationship with Syria. Area told OCCRP that it only hired Eliminalia to remove content through legal means because it was often unfair and assumed the company was at fault.

– Malkhas Tetruashvili, who launders money for Russian-Georgian mobster Tariel Oniani, paid Eliminalia 30,000 euros to get rid of 79 references to hard-hitting information about how a Spanish court sentenced him to five months in prison. Tetruashvili did not respond to a request for comment.

– Antonio Herrero Lazaro paid Eliminalia a total of €15,600 for 18 articles about his involvement in his involvement in running a prostitute network in Spain, for which he was convicted in 2014. Although the conviction was overturned, he is currently charged with aggravated tax fraud. Herrero did not respond to a request for comment.

– Jose Mestre Fernandez, who was convicted of running a Barcelona cocaine ring, was also one of Eliminalia’s clients. Mestre paid just over €30,000 to Eliminalia between 2016 and 2020. He did not respond to requests for comment.

– Higini Cierco and Ramon Cierco, former co-owners of Banca Privada d’Andorra, hired Eliminalia to remove articles about the bank’s money laundering investigation for a powerful criminal group. Internal records show that the Cierco brothers paid the company nearly €245,000 between 2016 and 2020. the Ciarco family’s lawyer said they would not hire a company using unethical tactics.

– Eliminalia has also been hired to represent prominent resellers of OneCoin, a cryptocurrency scam that has stolen billions of dollars from investors. Three brothers – Aron, Christian and Stefan Steinkeller – are accused of receiving millions of euros from this scheme and are charged in Italy. The company paid €38,000 to Eliminalia on its own behalf in 2021. The Steinkeller brothers did not respond to a request for comment.

Prelek of the University of Oxford said it has become “absolutely normal” for service providers such as lawyers and public relations companies to clean up troubled clients. Obscurity in search engine results may alter the results of a customer’s due diligence check with a bank or other regulated service provider.

Eliminalia’s best clients
These companies and individuals were some of the highest paid customers, according to the leaked data obtained by Forbidden Stories.

Compagnie Banquaire Helvetique (CBH)
Data shows Swiss bank Compagnie Banquaire Helvetique (CBH) paid Eliminalia just under €229,000 – after hiring one of its partners, ReputationUp – to take down content linking it to offshore companies and money laundering allegations. CB wanted to erase all mention of the bank’s relationship with Lazaro Bayes, an Argentine businessman who was convicted of laundering tens of millions of dollars in illegally obtained money related to corrupt government contracted bank accounts. OCCRP was among the publications that reported the dubious CBH connections. A CBH lawyer confirmed that the bank had a contract with ReputationUp, but said he was unaware of its connection to Eliminalia.

Banca Privada de Andorra (BPA)
Higini and Ramon Cierko, brothers who owned Banca Privada de Andorra (BPA), hired Eliminalia in July 2016. Last year, US authorities declared BPA a money laundering issue under the Patriot Act, citing the bank’s dealings with Venezuelan kleptocrats, the Russian authorities. oligarchs and allies of the former president of Mexico. The move banned the bank from using US dollars, which meant it could no longer operate. The Sierko brothers paid Eliminalia almost €245,000 through Spanish public relations firm Nearco to target more than 700 articles, either by deleting or de-indexing them or by lowering them in the search engine rankings. The Sierko family’s lawyer said they would not hire a company that used unethical methods.

Eliminalia is also partnering with its shady clients to expand its business.

One of the clients, the Italian law firm Studium Srl, founded a reputation management company called Digitallex, which then managed part of Eliminalia’s Italian business. In 2021, authorities launched an investigation into Digitallex shareholders for money laundering, fraudulent bankruptcy and tax evasion. The company did not respond to questions.

Another Italian partner, Ani Angelo Trevisan (Enea Angelo Trevan), hired Eliminalia after being sued for bankruptcy fraud in 2015. Two years later, he started doing business with reputation managers, founding an Italian company called Eliminalia Holding Sa and several other companies to manage Eliminalia’s business in Switzerland and Italy.

In 2018, Trevisan split from Eliminalia and renamed one of these companies, Eliminalia Italia Srl, Ealixir. Now selling its own online content removal services from the US, Ealixir is planning a public offering on the Nasdaq stock market and recently expanded into Latin America and the Caribbean. Trevisan did not respond to a request for comment.

‘Pursuit Mechanism’

Mexican journalist Daniel Sanchez published the results of an investigation into the state governor’s suspicious contracts with the Mexican video surveillance company Interconecta in January 2018, after which the phone calls began.

Initially, he said, the callers were fellow journalists who urged him to refute the story. He soon received a call from a man named Humberto Herrera Rincón Gallardo, saying that he worked for Eliminalia, who also insisted on retracting the article.

Gallardo’s tone was friendly and explained that the investigation had harmed Interconecta. But after his call, the situation began to escalate.

A page that looked strikingly similar to a post Daniel Sanchez works for, Página66, surfaced on Facebook and began posting fake articles under his name. A mosaic of photographs then circulated on social media showing him alongside other journalists, activists and politicians, accusing them of being “enemies of the government.”

Two local journalists he knew showed up and, according to him, they offered him bribes to disprove the story. He also said he had an argument with a close friend who also tried to put pressure on him.

Daniel Sanchez said he is convinced that Eliminalia was behind the campaign against him.

Leaked Eliminalia documents show that Gallardo actually represented Eliminalia’s client, Grupo Altavta, Interconecta’s parent company. In April 2019, the group hired Eliminalia to search for 13 links that mentioned their company, including an investigation by Sanchez published by Página66, for less than 13,000 euros.

Eliminalia’s owner, Diego Sanchez, said in a media interview that his company came to Mexico “because we found that countries with more corruption and political problems are countries with more business opportunities.”

Daniel Sanchez said the persecution made him fear for his life. Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, where at least 55 have been killed between 2018 and 2022, according to the government.

Then, in 2020, Página66 was taken down by Digital Ocean hosting for a week after someone filed a copyright infringement notice on the news site, as reported by Daniel Sanchez. The online record of the request shows that it was made by Gallardo, who provided a UK address.

Gallardo denied that he worked for Eliminalia, molested Sanchez, or filed a claim.

An investigation by Articulo19, the Central American branch of the press freedom advocacy group Article19, found that several journalists had been attacked with similar tactics. Priscilla Ruiz, legal coordinator for the group’s digital rights program, said she has identified at least one other case also linked to Eliminalia.

Ruiz said Articulo19 has spoken with Mexican law enforcement about challenging fake copyright infringement notices from digital platforms in court, but the law’s restrictions make it difficult to consolidate the case.

“In Mexico, it is difficult to argue that false copyright infringement notices issued by a shell company that has no record of its existence is evidence of fraud, as in the case of Eliminalia,” she said.

erasing the past

The notices filed against Página66 show how Eliminalia has used laws to intimidate critics of its clients. Reporters found that the company has made a business model out of the arms of the United States and the European Union of privacy and copyright.

The object of this tactic was OCCRP itself. In 2019, editors received a letter alleging that a lengthy investigation that found Swiss bank CBH moved $277 million in suspicious funds through shell companies owned by a Russian billionaire Alexey Krapivinviolated EU data protection regulations.

The message came from [email protected], one of several official sound domains that Eliminalia has used to send legal threats to the media. Reputation managers have increasingly used messages like this in recent years to force publishers to remove content or simply waste resources processing it.

Documents show that CBH hired Italian partner Eliminalia ReputationUp to find online content that linked it to offshore companies and money laundering. According to the data, CBH paid Eliminalia €229,000 for the job, making the bank one of the highest paid clients in their database.

Many of the letters sent to Eliminalia with accusations of privacy violations were signed by “Raul Soto”, a pseudonym used by an Eliminalia employee posing as a European Commission official in Brussels. An analysis of one of those emails by Qurium, a non-profit organization specializing in digital forensics, showed that the messages were sent from an IP address in Ukraine, where Eliminalia operated before the Russian invasion last year.

A CBH lawyer confirmed that the bank had a contract with ReputationUp, but said he was unaware of its connection to Eliminalia. “CBH has never allowed any illegal action to be taken on its behalf by anyone,” he said in a statement.

The Dangers of Disinformation
While Eliminalia employees posed as EU officials in messages to journalists, the company also weighed the risk of disinformation to the European Commission.
Speaking for Eliminalia, someone named Guillem Castro Izquierdo made a public statement in response to a call for feedback on disinformation, which the commission then posted online. He warned against spreading “deliberate misinformation to influence citizens’ judgments of international bodies”, other citizens and companies.

A few months later, Eliminalia used a different tactic when it targeted an OCCRP article about CBH client Dervik Asotites, an offshore firm that received $5 billion in energy contracts from the Venezuelan government without competition. The story mentions a former CBH manager who served the bank’s Venezuelan clients, Charles-Henry de Beaumont, another Eliminalia client.

The company cloned the OCCRP “Venezuela’s Plunging into Darkness” investigation into the fake news site Noticias-Politica.com, backdated it, and filed a complaint under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, US law. which requires online service providers to respond immediately to complaints in order to avoid liability for copyright infringements.

The purpose of this tactic is to force Google and other search engines to remove authentic articles from their search results. It has become an increasingly common form of disinformation in recent years, said Katherine Trendacosta, associate director for politics and activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

A Google spokesperson said it combats fraudulent takedown attempts through automated and human review processes and allows sites to file “counter notices” if content has been removed in error.

Noticias-Politica.com is one of 600 fake news domains created by Eliminalia, according to Qurium analysis. They are designed to appear to be real sites, but are actually filled with content stolen from legitimate publications such as The Daily Mail and Le Parien, as well as stories used in hindsight for erroneous copyright claims.

Qurium found many sites mentioned by Communication Media Group Ltd. in their fine print, as well as an address in the Caribbean island nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis. The websites also used clusters of IP addresses, at least two of which were recently transferred to Maidan Holdings LLC, until recently the management company of Eliminalia Ukraine.

These sites have been used for tactics such as cloning the subject’s history and deleting the customer’s name, as well as creating positive or neutral fake stories mentioning their customer in the hope that search engines will index them higher than the truthful ones. Eliminalia’s contract, reviewed by OCCRP, has the following objectives for the client: to drop “undesirable information” on the third page of the search engine “in a way that is harder to find.”

Eliminalia has also manipulated Google’s algorithm with “highlighting” – creating as many links as possible between websites – so that they rise through the rankings. In one case, operators for a reputation manager posted 7,000 links on an unsecured community college student union forum in order to fend off Eliminalia’s 2 million fake news articles.

Eliminalia is now touting more aggressive online tactics. In an interview from Georgia late last year, where Sanchez has set up new companies, he told a TV presenter that he was using an “army of hackers” to fight disinformation online.

But when the reporter visited the new office he recently opened in a residential area of ​​the capital, Tbilisi, he found no sign of anyone working there.

Eliminalia in Spain, meanwhile, was renamed in January. Sánchez’s name still appears on the Spanish register as the sole owner of the company, but the management team for his removal was changed in November.

At the workplace in Portal del Àngel, where Eliminalia was based, the new sign now reads “IDATA PROTECTION.”