S.D.Ga.: Corporate officer had no standing in corporation’s website police essentially hacked into

Defendant ran pmxrefinery.com which was under investigation for fraudulent invoices. The police contacted the website’s designer who volunteered the log-in credentials to the police without even being asked because she, too, suspected he was up to no good. Getting into the website, fraudulent invoices were found. Defendant, doing business as a corporation, had no standing to complain of police entry into hidden areas of the corporate website. United States v. Waddell, 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 176183 (S.D.Ga. Dec. 3, 2015), adopted 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 17727 (S.D.Ga. Feb. 12, 2016):

Here, Waddell stored no personal documents on pmxrefinery.com . He had no proverbial desk drawer in which he kept personal items. To the contrary, everything on the website related entirely to Global Gold’s business. Indeed, the only documents Rothschild bothered retaining were invoices of alleged precious metals sales — the very business Global Gold purported to engage in. Nothing related to Stacy Waddell. This case, therefore, does not even equate to those where a corporate officer seeks standing by claiming he had control over not only his personal office area, but all of the corporate facilities. See Novak, 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 499, 2015 WL 720970 at * 7. And it goes without saying that the “home” concept raised by defendants challenging the search of a brick-and-mortar corporate suite at best abstractly fits into a corporate suite that resides only in cyberspace.

Under those circumstances, the Court cannot disregard the corporate form for the benefit of an owner like Waddell, who argues that his personal rights are at stake precisely because he disregarded that form. See United States v. Lagow, 66 F. Supp. 738, 739 (S.D.N.Y. 1946) (piercing the corporate veil “is done not for the benefit of the person who organizes the corporation but for the purpose of protecting the rights of third persons, and then only in exceptional instances”), aff’d, 159 F.2d 245 (2d Cir. 1946). Accordingly, his motion to suppress the fruits of that search should be denied.