POT, KETTLE, BOTH BLACK

Fans of the salacious in Springfield are no doubt acquainted with Springfield IL Exposed, the website that shames people by posting mug shots of purported prostitutes and posting nude or nearly nude pictures of people too unsophisticated to realize it’s a bad idea to let anyone take photos of you in the altogether, because you might end up on the Internet. The website is also a headache for law enforcement, as the Sangamon County sheriff’s office deals with a never-ending stream of record requests from Randy Trams, the site’s creator, who has been arrested more than a half-dozen times and convicted once of computer tampering. He’s currently charged with blackmailing a woman by threatening to post nude pictures of her on the Internet if she didn’t have sex with him. Now, Trams is crying foul over the sheriff’s office releasing a police report to someone who had been featured on Springfield IL Exposed. That person posted the report, which named Trams as a suspect in a crime, on the Internet, and the report contained Trams’ Social Security number, phone number and driver’s license number, according to a lawsuit against the sheriff’s office filed by Trams on March 9. Trams is demanding $2,309.23, the cost of identity theft protection for seven years. He says that the sheriff’s office has refused to conduct an internal affairs investigation and has told him that redacting information from reports isn’t mandatory. He says his chances of collecting aren’t good, but he hopes to find out just how many times his personal information has been made public by the sheriff’s office. “At the end of the day, yeah, you could say it couldn’t have happened to a better person,” Trams says.