Someone filed at least five copyright removal notices against journalist Matthew Russell Lee’s reporting on the Centra Tech cryptocurrency fraud case in June 2026, pulling his articles from Google search results multiple times even after he immediately appealed each one, according to Lee’s reporting at Inner City Press.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires platforms to act quickly on copyright complaints, which creates a structural gap: Google removes flagged content first and reviews appeals second, meaning a takedown hits before any challenge can stop it. Google told Lee in January 2026 that an earlier notice against the same article was “invalid” and restored the content globally, but the complaints kept coming.
Four removal notices arrived on June 22, 2026, followed by another on June 28, Lee reported. The Lumen Database, a copyright-complaint transparency project affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and described by UNESCO as “promoting transparency,” logged the complaints under names including Simon Wells, Jenny Koey, Triah Phil, and Martha Ben, all marked as private individuals in Australia, Great Britain, and Switzerland. A fifth complaint was submitted under a redacted name. The same campaign also targeted Centra Tech coverage on CoinDesk, decider.com, and FinanceMagnates, Lee reported. Lee wrote that the complaints appeared to be coordinated by a reputation management firm using multiple false identities, but Lee’s reporting hasn’t identified the firm or who hired it.
A separate entity, Net-Legal.com, which Lee described as a “reputation management firm apparently in New York,” had already filed an earlier bogus DMCA complaint against the same Inner City Press article on January 19, 2026, according to Lee’s June 22 report. That complaint was filed using a different firm than the June 2026 notices, Lee wrote.
Lumen Database, which Google directs copyright-notice recipients to when content is removed, listed the June 2026 complaints only as “placeholders” for five days after the takedowns occurred, Lee reported. He wrote that Google and Lumen were both complicit, describing Lumen as “making money while calling the complaints ‘placeholders’ five days after the takedowns.” More than 24 hours after Lee filed his initial appeal on June 22, with no response from Google, a removal notice went into effect anyway, according to his June 23 report.
The targeted articles document the federal prosecution of Centra Tech, Inc., a Miami-based company whose co-founders raised more than $25 million from investors through an initial coin offering beginning around July 2017, according to a US Attorney’s Office announcement Lee published. Robert Farkas pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit securities fraud and wire fraud and was sentenced to one year and one day in prison. Co-founder Sohrab Sharma was sentenced on March 4 to eight years in prison and three years of supervised release, with a $20,000 fine, and was ordered to forfeit $36,088,960, according to Lee’s reporting. Co-defendant Raymond Trapani received time served after pleading guilty in April 2022. The case is United States v. Sharma, et al., 1:18-cr-340 before Judge Lorna G. Schofield in the Southern District of New York.
Seven victims, including Rensel, Yun Hi, Hao Poon, Fung Poon, Jae J. Lee, Rodney Warren, and Mateusz Ganczarek, filed a claim in January seeking some of $33 million in seized assets, which they say the Department of Justice intends to retain in its Assets Forfeiture Fund rather than distribute as restitution, Lee reported. Judge Schofield set a March 15 deadline for a new petition on the forfeiture question, with a government opposition due March 22.
On June 29, after receiving what he described as another automated complaint through Google Search Console with no reply to his previous appeals, Lee wrote to the Lumen Database requesting a researcher account to investigate the scale of the abuse. “Google and Lumen must stop facilitating and encouraging censorship,” Lee wrote in the letter, which he published at Inner City Press.
Featured image: Bushwick Daily image
