Confidential (NDA)
Series B fintech startup. CEO faced coordinated reputation attack — fabricated fraud accusations posted across Reddit, Glassdoor, Medium, and 3 news aggregators.
Services
Content Removal
Industry
Financial Technology
Company Size
120 Employees
Timeline
5 Days
Executive reputation crisis — 94 URLs removed across 12 platforms in 5 days.
The challenge
A coordinated reputation attack targeting a fintech CEO. Fabricated fraud accusations appeared on Reddit, Glassdoor, Medium, and three news aggregators — all ranking on Google's first page.
The CEO was two weeks from closing a $15M Series B round when the content surfaced. The lead investor's due diligence team flagged the search results immediately. The deal was paused. Three previous attorneys had advised that removal was "not possible" for Reddit and news aggregator content.
The approach
AboutUs deployed a multi-vector removal strategy within 2 hours of engagement, targeting all 12 platforms simultaneously.
Phase 1: DMCA and defamation-based removal requests filed across Reddit, Glassdoor, Medium, and all three news aggregators. Phase 2: Google Search Console deindexing requests for all 94 URLs, combined with legal escalation to hosting providers. Phase 3: Ongoing monitoring deployed across 237+ platforms to detect re-uploads. Evidence vault activated — all content archived with timestamps for potential litigation.
The Results
All 94 URLs were removed within 5 business days. Google's first page for the CEO's name was completely cleared. The Series B round closed on schedule. No re-uploads were detected during the 90-day monitoring period.
94 harmful URLs removed across 12 platforms
Google first page cleared of all negative content within 5 days
Series B funding round closed successfully 3 weeks later
Zero content re-uploads detected in 90-day monitoring period
Court-admissible evidence package delivered for litigation
"We were 48 hours from losing a $15M round. AboutUs cleared every search result in 5 days. The investors never saw it again."
CEO, Series B Fintech
fintech-ceo-crisis
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