Not responding

BustedMugshots is not serving anything

Site guide · bustedmugshots.com · checked 2026-08-25

BustedMugshots does not serve a page. Attempts to reach it fail during the TLS handshake — the machine answers and then the secure connection collapses, which is what a long-abandoned host looks like. We are not calling it parked, because we could not observe a parking page; we can only tell you that nothing is being served. If your record was there, nobody is reading it now.

That has not stopped the removal industry from selling its removal, on pages revised within the last year.

What this site was

• It was one of the significant operations of the mugshot industry's first era. It was run by Citizens Information Associates LLC of Austin, Texas, with Kyle Prall as founder and chief executive, alongside related entities named in 2011 reporting — Star Nine Ventures and Mugly Media.
• The business model was the one the industry became notorious for: obtain booking photos through public-information requests, publish them, optimise them for search, and charge to take them down.
• It sourced from government. A St. Louis agency sold Prall daily booking photographs from May 2012 at a reported $150 a week — the same feed that supplied STL Mugshots two years later. The site held more than 120,000 St. Louis County mugshots and stopped updating that collection in April 2019.
• An Ohio federal class action settled at the end of December 2013. BustedMugshots and a companion site agreed to stop charging takedown fees and to remove three plaintiffs' photographs, with $7,500 in restitution. Prall called it a nuisance payment and said the policy had already changed in October 2013.
• October 2013 is the month the industry turned: Google downranked mugshot sites following a New York Times investigation, and Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express and PayPal cut off payment processing for them within weeks.
• Prall was later sentenced, on 29 October 2019, to 36 months in prison for mail fraud in an unrelated scheme involving political action committees, with $548,428 in restitution. The Justice Department announcement makes no mention of mugshot websites; the connection to this site comes from earlier press reporting, not from the prosecution.

What actually works now

There is nothing to pay

No fee, no form, no negotiation. Nothing is being served, so there is nothing at this domain to buy your way off.

The only thing that helps

If a search result still shows the old page, use Google's Refresh Outdated Content tool. It exists for exactly this: a page that no longer exists but is still appearing.

You do not need to own the page

That is the point people miss. The tool requires that you do not own the page and that the page no longer exists or has significantly changed. Both are true here.

What to expect

Processing takes a few days. A request is denied if the text you describe is still on the live page — not an issue here — and an approved request expires after 180 days or when the URL stops existing.

What is still being sold for this site

Three removal companies were still selling removal from this site on pages revised in the last year, and none of them mentions that the site is gone.

One advertises a 72-hour turnaround with a money-back guarantee and describes the site in the present tense as carrying nearly a million indexed pages. Another says removal “can cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars.” A third lists it among the sites it removes from.

Exactly one vendor appears to have noticed: a well-known privacy service's opt-out guide for this domain now returns a 404. It is the only page in the set that was retired rather than left standing.

Where Google comes into it

There is nothing to de-index at the source, because there is no source. A stale search result can outlive the page it points at, and that is a recrawl problem rather than a removal problem. Google's exploitative-removal policy is irrelevant here — its trigger is a site requiring payment, and this site requires nothing because it does nothing.

What we would charge you for, and what we would not

• Do not pay anyone to remove your record from this site. There is no record being served and no one to ask.
• If a search result still shows it, file the refresh request yourself. It is free and it is the correct tool. We will walk you through it on the phone without charging you.
• Where we are worth paying: the copies. A booking that was on this site in its active years was almost certainly scraped onto others, and those are live problems with live routes. That is the work — not this domain.

Try the free route first

This is the tool for a search result still showing a page that no longer exists. It is free, and — the part almost nobody knows — you must NOT own the page to use it. That is its entire purpose. Processing takes a few days. A request is refused if the text you describe is still on the live page, so it works only once the page is genuinely gone, which here it is.

Open Google’s Refresh Outdated Content tool

Sources

• Fort Worth Weekly — “An Ugly Business”, 9 November 2011
• Ohio class action settlement reported 8 January 2014
• Riverfront Times — the government booking-photo feed
• Google — Refresh Outdated Content tool

Every claim on this page was checked against these sources on 2026-08-25. Sites in this category change without notice. If you find something here that is no longer true, tell us and we will correct it.