Two respected exes Wall Street Journal Journalists have announced that they will take legal action against Indian businessman Gaurav Kumar Srivastava for lying to the Google search engine.
Srivastava is reportedly using false pretenses to force Google to de-index a story that exposed him as a fraud and con artist who misused the name of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to defraud a Dutch oil trader.
Pulitzer Prize winner Bradley Hope and Pulitzer Prize nominee Tom Wright published an investigative story on their website Project Brazen — Whalehunting, which describes itself as “the ultimate destination for fearless journalism,” revealing how Srivastava posed as an agent of America’s main spy agency, the CIA, to pull off an international fraud on Geneva-based Dutch oil trader Niels Troost.
It was revealed that Srivastava used a creative lie to complain to Google that the award-winning investigative journalism website had stolen the content of a story about Srivastava from another blog site.
Using Google’s copyright policy to his advantage, Srivastava used a fraudulent technique to extract the story for himself, according to the reporters.
This involved pasting the text of the article into a blog post on Tumblr or Medium hosting sites and then rerouting the posts, making them appear to have been published earlier than the Project Brazen article. Srivastava then used pseudonyms or fake names to file a copyright complaint with Google to de-index the articles.
The investigative journalism website said: “We will challenge this fraudulent takedown request to make sure our story is shown again in search engines.”
Bradley Hope said: “We don’t know who made the false claim but it was someone who didn’t want others to read our report. We have complained to Google.”
One of the investigative story’s reporters, Soobin Kim, tweeted: “Our story @WhaleHunting_ has been removed from Google’s indexes due to copyright complaints. The complaints, filed with @lumendatabase, allege that we copied a retroactive blog post that had all of its content removed from our story. This is how scammers curate their online reputation.”
Project Brazen from its official verified handle has revealed the full scale of the shocking scam Gaurav Srivastava perpetrated on Google to get his report removed from Google.
