When a sloppily made business profile directory meets a lack of journalistic ethics, the truth and the reputation of innocent people fall victim. A case study of attorney Daria Adamus, whose image was unlawfully linked to drug charges through SEO errors and editorial laziness. Attorney Adamus has absolutely no connection to the criminal charges described in the Kozanecki case.
Table of Contents
One bad photo. Mephedrone. And a lawyer who has nothing to do with it.
The case of the “coffin lawyer” is a self-perpetuating topic on the Polish internet that hasn’t left the headlines for months. However, what has happened in recent days goes beyond the framework of a standard moral scandal. The media, feeding on the information about drug charges for the lawyer’s wife, entered a mode of total thoughtlessness. The effect? Through a combination of programming sloppiness and editorial laziness, a completely unassociated person became the face of the mephedrone scandal. Today we will analyze this pathological chain of events: from the leaky architecture of online directories to the collapse of ethics in newsrooms, which, in the pursuit of clicks, forgot about basic source verification.
Let’s start by finding the name of the “coffin lawyer’s” wife. We are aided in this by Google’s AI Overview mode, which, with its characteristic disregard for the legal and social context of the service, serves us personal data faster than GDPR lawyers can open their laptops.
Entering the phrase “coffin lawyer wife name” returns (each iteration of the AI overview will be different; for me, it looked like this):
“The wife of Łódź attorney Paweł Kozanecki, referred to as the lawyer of the ‘coffin on wheels’, is named Paulina Kuraś-Kozanecka (currently also described in the media as Paulina K.).” It seems to me that further comments are unnecessary.
However, more interesting things are happening in the images indexed by Google. In the search results, we see a photo captioned as Paulina Kuraś-Kozanecka; we will see the same thing in the Google Images tab. The problem is that the person in the photo is attorney Adamus, and the effect of such indexing is the botched work of the contractor for the skuteczny-adwokat.pl website, who has no idea about indexing algorithms. And due to the lack of appropriate declarations, Google bots randomly match photos to the name.
However, there is a continuation to this unfunny story. Namely, Mariusz Gzyl, the author of the article Wife of Paweł Kozanecki detained - prosecutor: mephedrone and marijuana, fell victim to a cognitive bias and the effect of total ignorance. This was all accompanied by an illegally downloaded image, i.e., the photo of attorney Adamus, which editor Gzyl placed as the main illustration of the article without consent, captioning it as the wife of the infamous lawyer. Attorney Adamus has absolutely no connection to the criminal charges described in the Kozanecki case.
I spoke with Mrs. Adamus before the whole Internet started escalating the matter, and later with her husband, and they are currently taking appropriate legal steps to clear her reputation.
Thus, in the publication by the checkPRESS.pl portal on June 3, 2026, regarding the detention of Paulina Kuraś-Kozanecka, the image of another person, attorney Daria Adamus, was unlawfully used. This phenomenon is not the result of a single mistake, but of overlapping errors: gaps in the information architecture of the skuteczny-adwokat.pl service and glaring negligence at the level of source verification in the editorial process. I would simply call it trash journalism, because unfortunately, we currently have a plague of this phenomenon.
Error vector… human stupidity
The primary source of the problem is the way the skuteczny-adwokat.pl service manages the visual context within the DOM (Document Object Model). A dynamic “Most frequently rated” module is implemented on the subpage assigned to a specific lawyer (in this case, Paulina Kuraś-Kozanecka).
This module loads thumbnail photos of other lawyers within the same URL structure. The Google crawler, scanning the target page, links the graphic resources found on it with the main entity described by the metadata, i.e., the name of the profile owner. The proof of the structure generating this error is shown in the file below. As a result of improper resource separation, the image of attorney Daria Adamus was indexed in Google Images in the context of another person’s profile. This state is reflected in the compilation of image search results.
Paulina Kuraś-Kozanecka’s profile has a generic placeholder as og:image — profile_female.png. There is no assigned photo in the meta declarations. However, the service exposes Kozanecka’s phone number and email address in plain text within structured data (JSON-LD), personal data available to machines without any protection. This is a separate GDPR thread, but a telling context for a service that figures in its description as a tool for promoting lawyers.
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From the information provided to me directly by attorney Adamus, it appears that the problem of faulty indexing of lawyers’ images from this service had been flagged previously.
Lack of source verification
The availability of manipulated context in the search engine does not exempt the publisher from the obligation to verify. The author of the article, relying on the Google Images index, succumbed to a cognitive shortcut (confirmation bias). The verification process most likely ended at the thumbnail preview stage, without visiting the source page to confirm the identity of the person in the photo, and that is just 1 mouse click…
Ignoring this basic procedure resulted in the publication of material in which the image of an unrelated lawyer from Będzin was juxtaposed with prosecutorial charges regarding the possession of mephedrone. It is worth noting that a basic verification of a text query in Google generates correct AI summaries providing the full surname.
It is worth noting that the photo was replaced about four hours after publication and following interventions by Mr. and Mrs. Adamus. The checkPRESS.pl editorial team, however, did not publish any press correction. Swapping the photo does not remove the error from the Google index, does not reverse the image damage, and does not absolve the publisher of responsibility for the original publication, which remains archived.
Legal risks?
Let’s summarize this case. From an infrastructural and legal perspective, we are dealing with two violations:
Responsibility of the directory administrator: The skuteczny-adwokat.pl service acts as a personal data controller (an image constitutes personal data within the meaning of Art. 4 point 1 of the GDPR). Maintaining an architecture that systemically assigns images to the wrong profiles is a direct violation of the principle of data accuracy (Art. 5 sec. 1 lit. d of the GDPR). The lack of isolation mechanisms for graphic resources is an architectural flaw with serious legal consequences. Especially if we create a drug-related legend for someone and add a criminal husband.
Responsibility of the publisher: The publication of a third party’s image in the context of criminal proceedings gives rise to direct civil liability for the infringement of personal rights on the part of checkPRESS.pl, and potentially also criminal liability. In my assessment, it should be investigated whether the lack of a correction is not a violation of press law. Failure to publish a correction may constitute a violation of Art. 31a of the Press Law - the assessment belongs to the competent authority or court.
The article in its original form was archived by me in external systems (snapshot: https://archive.ph/ZNEXP) and internal tools of archiv.dadalo.pl, which permanently preserves evidence of the violation, regardless of subsequent modifications on the publisher’s website.
Recommendations for the victims
Mr. and Mrs. Adamus asked what to do. In the case of identifying similar anomalies in image indexing, the procedure should include:
- Submitting a request for data erasure (Art. 17 of the GDPR) to the directory administrator.
- Demanding the removal of indexed content from the Google index.
- A pre-trial demand to remove the material and publish a correction directed at publishers reproducing erroneous data - this can also be handled by contacting the companies on whose servers these data are illegally processed.
