How Mugshot Sites Turn a Public Booking Photo Into a Business

How the Mugshot Business Model Actually Works

The pipeline behind most mugshot sites is straightforward, and understanding it explains almost everything else in this post.

An arrest happens, and the booking photo and basic details become a public record held by the local jail or sheriff’s department.

A private site scrapes that record — for free, since it’s public — and republishes it on its own domain, optimized so the arrested person’s name is one of the first things that surfaces when someone searches it. The site earns money two ways: advertising and background-check referral traffic while the listing is up, and, on many of these sites historically, a “de-publishing” or “removal” fee charged directly to the person in the photo.

That second revenue stream — charging the person the record is about — is the part that has drawn the most legal scrutiny, for reasons that become clear once you separate what’s legal from what isn’t.

Why Publishing a Booking Photo Is Usually Legal

Arrest records, including booking photos, are public records in most jurisdictions. Republishing a public record is generally protected — the same basic principle that lets newspapers report on arrests before a conviction.

This is why simply asking a mugshot site to take a listing down because it’s embarrassing or because charges were later dropped often doesn’t succeed on its own: the site isn’t publishing anything it wasn’t legally allowed to publish in the first place. It’s the same “publicly available record” reasoning that lets a data broker resell your address and phone number — see our guide to that parallel legal gap — even though the two industries operate very differently day to day.

That’s also why the legal fight over this industry hasn’t centered on whether these sites can exist. It has centered on what they’re allowed to charge for.

The Case That Put the Industry on Notice

In May 2018, California’s Attorney General charged four individuals — Sahar Sarid, Kishore Vidya Bhavnanie, Thomas Keesee, and David Usdan — connected to Mugshots.com with extortion, money laundering, and identity theft. The allegation: the site published mugshots for free, then directed people to a separate “de-publishing” service where they paid to have their own listing removed.

The Attorney General’s office put a number on the scale of it: roughly $64,000 extracted from about 175 California residents, and an estimated $2 million nationally from around 5,703 people. Then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra didn’t mince words about the model: “This pay-for-removal scheme attempts to profit off of someone else’s humiliation.”

The case took years to resolve. In May 2025, Sarid, Bhavnanie, and Keesee were sentenced after pleading no contest to identity theft and attempted extortion, receiving probation and a combined $78,000 in restitution; Usdan had separately pleaded guilty to a lesser accessory charge back in 2022. If you’re dealing with a Mugshots.com listing specifically, we walk through the current, non-pay-to-delete removal process — the site has reportedly moved away from charging for removal since the case.

States Are Starting to Draw a Legal Line

Since that case, a number of states have passed laws specifically targeting pay-for-removal mugshot practices — generally requiring free removal once charges are dropped, someone is acquitted, or a record is expunged, and in some cases banning removal fees for arrest-record photos outright.

The exact rules differ meaningfully by state: what counts as a qualifying record, how long a site has to comply, and what the penalty is for not complying all vary. We keep the state-specific detail on the individual site pages where it applies — for example, our breakdown of the eight states with the clearest anti-extortion statutes — rather than repeating it here, since getting a specific state’s statute wrong is worse than not citing one.

The trend itself is the important part: what used to be an unregulated gray area is now something several state legislatures have decided needs an explicit legal boundary.

Why the Federal Government Treats Its Own Booking Photos Differently

A separate, older case adds an interesting wrinkle, even though it doesn’t directly touch the commercial mugshot industry. In Detroit Free Press v. Department of Justice (2016), a federal appeals court ruled — reversing its own 20-year-old precedent — that federal booking photos held by agencies like the U.S. Marshals Service carry a real privacy interest under federal open-records law, and aren’t automatically public just because someone is criminally charged.

This case is easy to misread as bigger than it is. It applies specifically to federal FOIA requests aimed at federal agencies — it doesn’t reach the county and state jail records that actually feed the commercial mugshot sites covered above, and it doesn’t require any private website to take anything down.

It’s worth knowing mainly because it shows the federal government has, for its own records, moved toward more caution around booking-photo privacy — even while the state and county records the industry runs on remain broadly public.

What This Means If Your Mugshot Is Already Out There

If a booking photo of you is on one of these sites, the legal reality cuts both ways. The site publishing it likely isn’t breaking the law just by having it up — public records are, by design, publishable.

But if anyone is demanding money from you specifically to remove it, that request deserves real scrutiny, not automatic compliance: it’s the exact practice that has led to criminal charges, and several states now restrict or ban it outright.

One booking photo is also rarely confined to a single site — the same record tends to get scraped and republished by several aggregators independently, which is a separate mechanism worth understanding on its own; see our guide to how that syndication actually works. Our mugshot removal guide walks through the current process for the specific sites we cover, including which ones still require payment, which have moved away from it, and what your state-specific options actually look like — the same way we approach court records more broadly.

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