Live · removal is free

Removing your record from BustedNewspaper

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

Live, free to remove from, and gated: it wants a court document, and its dropdown accepts only four dispositions.

BustedNewspaper does not charge for removal. Nothing on its removal page or in its terms asks for money, and anyone quoting you a fee to pay the site is describing something that does not exist. What it does want is a document, and that gate is the real difficulty: if your case is open or ended in a conviction, its published process has no route for you.

It is also the largest site in this category by coverage, which means a removal here is worth having and is rarely the whole job.

What this site is

Registered since 11 December 2007 through GoDaddy, with the registrant masked behind Domains By Proxy. The footer credits “Teabar Publishing”, a name that matches no corporate registry we could find. Treat it as self-asserted.
Coverage is organised as bustednewspaper.com/mugshots/{state}/{county}-county/ — 35 states in the navigation, and Texas alone runs to 152 separate county pages. It is actively publishing: on the day we checked, its Andrews County, Texas page carried a booking from the day before.
It runs a merchandise shop alongside the records, which tells you something about how the operation sees itself.
There is a cluster of separately registered lookalike domains reusing the brand — bustednews-usa.com, bustednewspaperr.com, texas-arrests.org. Whether they carry the same records or are independent SEO clones is not established, so check them by name rather than assuming.

How removal actually works

Where

bustednewspaper.com/remove-a-listing/ — note that /opt-out/ and /removal/ both 404, and /remove/ redirects here. Support address is support@bustednewspaper.com.

What it asks for

Name, email, a phone number for a verification callback, the exact URL of the listing, a reason from a fixed dropdown, and a mandatory document upload capped at 3MB.

The gate

The reason dropdown offers only Expunged, Dismissed, Sealed, or Not Guilty. A letter from your attorney documenting the disposition is accepted in place of the court document itself.

How long

The site says verifying and removing “may take up to 5-10 days”. Treat that as the start of the clock, not the end of the job — the search result has to be recrawled afterwards.

What the removal industry charges for this site

Five removal companies publish a BustedNewspaper-specific page. Not one of them states a price on it. Every quote is behind a consultation.

The published industry ranges, quoted from the vendors that publish them: MugshotRemovalService lists $500–$2,500 per listing and calls pay-for-delete sites “scammy”; RemoveMugshots advertises a $1,700 package; MugShotsRemoved starts at $995. None of those numbers is attached to this site specifically.

One vendor is unusually straight about what the money buys. Sage Titans writes that you are paying “for the work of filing it correctly, clearing Google, and chasing the copies, not a payment to the site.” That is an accurate description of the service, and it is the same description we would give.

Where Google comes into it

Because it does not charge, its URLs are not eligible under Google's exploitative-removal-practices policy. That policy has three conditions and the load-bearing one is that the website requires payment — to itself or to another agency — before it will take the content down. BustedNewspaper requires neither, so the route is closed here.

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

If you have the document and your case fits one of the four reasons, send it yourself. The form is free and it works. We will tell you that on the call rather than charging you for it.
Where we are worth paying: your case does not fit the dropdown, the form has been ignored, or the record has already been copied elsewhere. One booking is typically republished several times, and a removal here does nothing for the copies.
Check mugshots.zone at the same time. The two share a Cloudflare nameserver pair, the same privacy proxy, the same /remove-a-listing form path and the same “up to 10 days” promise. That is strong corroboration of common operation, though a shared nameserver pair is drawn from a finite pool and is not proof.

Common questions

Does BustedNewspaper charge to remove a mugshot?

No. There is no fee language anywhere on its removal page or terms. If someone has quoted you a fee to pay the site, that fee is not going to the site.

What if my charges were not dropped?

Its published process has no route for you — the dropdown accepts only expunged, dismissed, sealed or not guilty. That is where a request has to be argued rather than filed, and where our work starts.

Will removing it here clear the search result?

Not on its own. The page has to come down first, and then Google has to recrawl. If the record was copied to another site before removal, those copies are untouched.

How long before it is actually gone from Google?

The site's own window is 5–10 days. After that, if the page is genuinely gone and the old version is still showing, Google's Refresh Outdated Content tool will resync it, usually in a few days. You do not need to own the page to use that tool.

Try the free route first

Google removes your phone number, home address, email and — since February 2026 — government ID numbers at no cost through its own tool. More than 10 million people have used it. It does not cover arrest records, so it will not touch the listing on this page, but it is free and worth running before you pay anyone for anything.

Open Google’s Results about you tool

Sources

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.