Live · no published process

Removing your record from STL Mugshots

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

Says it accepts no payment. A television investigation recorded a $500 fee being quoted. Missouri law makes that a crime and gives you $10,000.

STL Mugshots states on its homepage that it will not accept any type of payment for removal. A St. Louis television investigation recorded a man identifying himself as the site's operator quoting a $500 processing fee, and a civil suit filed in the Circuit Court of the City of St. Louis names the same person as running both the publishing site and a removal service. If you were asked to pay, Missouri gives you a specific and unusually strong remedy.

This is the page where a reader in Missouri has real leverage, and it does not come from Google.

What this site is

The operator is named: Edmund Ben Tauk. He previously published a print tabloid called Behind the Bars, sold for a dollar a copy in city gas stations from around 2010, and launched the website around 2014. That is a rare thing in this category — a person, not a privacy proxy.
The data came from government. The Regional Justice Information Service, a St. Louis agency founded in 1974, sold daily booking photographs. Kyle Prall of BustedMugshots gained access in May 2012; Tauk gained access in 2014. Each reportedly paid $150 a week, described as offsetting programming costs. Volumes ran to dozens a day and often exceeded 2,000 cases a month.
The site is organised by Missouri ZIP code across the 63000–65999 range, with pages at browse.php, browse-zip.php and show.php. It covers the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County municipalities.
It also runs a “Matching Game” at game.php. That is worth knowing when you are deciding how to characterise the publication's purpose.
The domain was registered on 2 December 2012 through GoDaddy, masked behind Domains By Proxy. The anonymity is at the registrar; the operator is known from court and press records instead.

How removal actually works

Published route

There is none. The site publishes no removal policy and no form — only a contact page.

What it says about money

That it will not accept any type of payment for removal of a mugshot. That statement is contradicted by the recorded fee quote and by the pleadings in the civil case.

The statutory route

Missouri Revised Statutes §407.1150, effective 28 August 2014, makes it unlawful to solicit or accept payment from the subject to remove or correct criminal record information.

What the statute gives you

A class A misdemeanour, each solicited payment a separate violation, and a private remedy of $10,000 or actual and punitive damages, whichever is greater, plus fees and costs. The statute states that humiliation or embarrassment is adequate to show damages — which removes the usual proof problem.

What the removal industry charges for this site

The two figures on record here are not vendor prices. They are what was reportedly asked of subjects: $500 quoted by a person identifying himself as the operator, on a recording obtained by FOX 2; and around $550 charged by a separate service called Remove Arrest, per the same station's earlier investigation.

One national removal company publishes an STL Mugshots page. It states no price, offers a free analysis, a money-back guarantee and a seven-day window.

If you were asked to pay to have your own listing removed from this site, do not treat that as a price. Treat it as the fact pattern §407.1150 was written for.

Where Google comes into it

The exploitative-removal route is the one place this site may qualify where others do not, because Google's condition is that the website requires payment — to the site or other agencies — to have the content removed. A documented fee demand is exactly that. Keep the evidence: Google asks for URLs and screenshots. Note carefully what a granted request does, though. It de-indexes the URL you submitted. Site-wide demotion is a separate, volume-triggered mechanism that Google does not promise for any single request.

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

If you were quoted a fee, keep every message, screenshot the demand, and speak to a Missouri lawyer about §407.1150 before you speak to us. A statutory claim worth $10,000 is worth more than anything we sell.
Where we help: the search result and the copies, which the statute does not reach. And documenting the fee demand properly so the exploitative-removal submission to Google is complete the first time.
The upstream matters here more than usual. This corpus came from a government agency selling booking photos by subscription — the same feed that supplied BustedMugshots. If your booking is in that feed, the copies question is not hypothetical.

Common questions

Does STL Mugshots charge to remove a mugshot?

Its homepage says it will not accept payment. A FOX 2 recording captured a man identifying himself as the operator quoting a $500 processing fee, and a civil petition names the same person behind both the site and a removal service. Draw your own conclusion, and keep your records.

What is Missouri §407.1150?

A 2014 statute making it unlawful for anyone publishing criminal record information to solicit or accept payment from the subject to remove or correct it. It carries a class A misdemeanour, treats each solicited payment as a separate violation, and gives a private remedy of $10,000 or actual and punitive damages, whichever is greater.

Do I have to prove I was harmed?

The statute says humiliation or embarrassment is adequate to show damages. That is deliberately low, and it is the provision that makes this claim practical rather than theoretical.

Where did the photographs come from?

A St. Louis government agency that sold daily booking photographs by subscription. Reporting puts the price at $150 a week, and the same feed supplied at least one other mugshot site.

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.