On August 5, I wrote about a temporary restraining order in Goldstone Financial Group, LLC v. FinanceScam.com that ordered the removal of posts alleging that Goldstone Financial Group and its CEO Anthony Pellegrino had engaged in deceptive attempts to try to vanish material about them from Internet searches.
I explained that there had indeed been seemingly deceptive attempts to vanish such material about Goldstone and Pellegrino, though they denied that the attempts came from them, or were authorized by them. Now it turns out that someone submitted yet another deindexing request to Google, asking Google to remove various pages about Goldstone and Pellegrino from search results. That request was based on the Complaint that Goldstone and Pellegrino had filed, and it sought the deindexing not just of posts on FinanceScam.com but also from various government sites:
- https://adviserinfo.sec.gov/individual/summary/6390276 (the Securities and Exchange Commission page related to Anthony Pellegrino, which includes records of certain government proceedings against him).
- https://brokercheck.finra.org/individual/summary/5900843 (a Financial Industry Regulatory Authority page containing records of various proceedings related to Michael Pellegrino, who appears to have also been involved in the matter listed in item 5 below).
- A page uploaded to squarespace.com, URL too long to include here (a Florida state court order related to the settlement of a lawsuit in which Goldstone was one of the defendants).
- https://www.finance.idaho.gov/wp-content/uploads/legal/administrative-actions/securities/enforcement-orders/documents/2022/4843-2019-7-05-C-Goldstone-Financial-A-Pellegrino-AO.pdf (an Idaho Department of Finance order in an investigation of Anthony Pellegrino and Financial).
- https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2022/33-11045.pdf (a Securities and Exchange Commission order instituting proceedings against Goldstone, Anthony Pellegrino, and Michael Pellegrino).
The request also sought to deindex, among other things, material published by VitalLaw.com, a seemingly reputable research service provided by Wolters Kluwer, and by RegComplianceWatch.com, likewise a seemingly reputable research service.
Now I should stress that this deindexing request does not itself appear to be fraudulent. It appears to attach an accurate version of a filed Complaint. It doesn’t claim that the Complaint is a court order. Nor does it make any inaccurate claims of copyright infringement. And, as before, it’s not certain who submitted the request.
Still, it seems noteworthy that someone is trying—even if so far unsuccessfully—to get Google to hide from search results government documents that discuss investigations of financial professionals. I e-mailed Goldstone’s and Pellegrino’s lawyer, as well as Goldstone itself, for a comment but have not heard back; naturally, I’d be glad to post their response on the matter.
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