[kenbaylor]

This is a big point of confusion. A background check will check the court records, where your convictions will still be listed (unless protected from disclosure e.g. California background checks generally don't show convictions > 7 years https://www.goodhire.com/california/background-checks).

A real con artist can just fake someone's ID, for them it's pretty trivial.

The issue is less than 1% of convictions ever make it to the Internet, and those people currently will be stigmatized forever, unlike the other 99%, unless they have this mechanism. Google's plea was 'we will self police, but we won't tell you how. We will ignore court orders, because we choose to'. The court objected to that approach.

If you are convicted of new crimes, no matter how long ago, then your sentence may be significantly increased as a repeat offender.

[ivanhoe]

I guess it depends where you live. In my country faking IDs is hard as we use biometric documents and it's a very serious crime, so many small time tricksters will not do that. There's a tone of small online merchants, lousy businessmen, crooks, etc. pulling small tricks on people - taking money and not providing anything in return, or providing really bad service, or you order one thing and they send you something else. Since CC payments are still not that common here and it's not uncommon that you wire your money to the merchant and then you're not covered by usual money-back guarantees from the bank and visa, and you need to complain to them and threaten to sue them and then they usually give you money back after a few months, using it meanwhile for their own profit. They do that on purpose. However, if you know better usually you can google them and find people complaining about being tricked, so you can avoid falling in the trap. I'm not talking about big media news, but usually forum posts or tweets and things like that, and you can't find those ever without a help of google. I do this every time I buy something online from a local seller. Since this is EU, if this right to be forgotten becomes a common law they'll be able to completely cover their tracks and I see that as a real-life problem for me and many others here.