N.J. firm made misleading websites in names of multiple Canadians and an alleged CRA scammer

If his Google Scholar profile is to be believed, Louis Arriola is a prolific scientist, having contributed to more than 700 scholarly articles about a wide range of unrelated disciplines from economics to advanced nanotechnology. 

According to the profile, he contributed to a PhD dissertation on the automotive industry before he turned nine years old. 

While the papers appear to be real, Arriola's contribution to the research is questionable. His name does not appear on the original publication in the 20 most recent entries on his profile and a university professor credited on more than 100 of the papers confirmed Arriola was not involved.

An investigation by CBC's The Fifth Estate has found that Arriola is among more than 100 people, including multiple Canadians, with a similar pattern of spam and false web content surrounding them. Website registration records, online advertising data and connections between fake social media profiles indicate that pattern points to a New Jersey reputation management firm called cleanyourname.com

David Rosenberg of Lakewood, N.J., who operates cleanyourname.com, advertises on his LinkedIn page that he can "delete online negative info fast," and that "by creating new and relevant content," his company is able to push negative online information "further down the search results in Google, Yahoo and Bing."

A LinkedIn post from Rosenberg states that only seven per cent of people go beyond the first page of search results.

"This meant that for reputation management, if we pushed down a negative to the third page," he wrote, "almost no one would see it."

In Arriola's case, looking beyond the first page of results and searching public records databases shows a long history of legal troubles. 

An affidavit from an employee of the Canada Revenue Agency, submitted to Federal Court in 2020, says that Arriola was the operator of a "paper company" with "no real business activity" involved in a tax "scheme" that saw the agency pay out $63 million in what it called "illegitimate" refunds. 

Arriola also was convicted in 2009 in California for a telecom-related fraud and has been named in civil lawsuits in multiple U.S. states that were pursuing him and companies he controlled for money that was loaned and allegedly never paid back.

His Google Scholar profile is one part of an interconnected cloud of misleading and spam websites. Blog posts about him link to an artist profile advertising stock images as his "work," as well as accounts at video sharing platforms and a website containing his name — louisarriola.net — which has connections to Rosenberg of cleanyourname.com. 

The Fifth Estate has attempted to contact Arriola in multiple ways over the past two years but has received no response. For this story, contact was attempted via a LinkedIn profile that was recently active.

A good deal of the information about Arriola available online is true, making it difficult to separate fact from fiction. For instance, on his IMDB profile, he is listed as executive producer for the 2019 film Rambo: Last Blood, a fact supported by the appearance of his name in the end credits of the film.

"The whole point here is to confuse people, confuse people about the truth in relation to this particular person," said Ahmed Al-Rawi, director of The Disinformation Project at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C.