New York seizes a dozen celebrity deepfake websites

The Manhattan District Attorney's Office announced on Monday that it had seized 12 domains used to unlawfully share, publish and sell nonconsensual celebrity deepfake videos. According to the office, around 1,200 people, overwhelmingly women, were depicted in nonconsensual sexual images and videos on the sites, including social media influencers, actors, activists, athletes, musicians and politicians.

District attorney Alvin Bragg said the violations follow victims into their careers and personal lives and take an immense toll on emotional and mental well-being. He urged potential victims to contact the office's cybercrime bureau. Investigations into who ran the websites and who uploaded the videos are continuing.

Takedown notices replaced the homepages

The seizures were carried out under New York's criminal procedure laws. The office has not named the sites publicly, but WIRED independently observed several homepages being replaced late last week with notices reading "THIS DOMAIN HAS BEEN SEIZED"; the pages now refer to a seizure warrant issued by a New York State Supreme Court. In the US, part of the Take It Down Act allows law enforcement to take down and seize websites.

Leonie Oehmig, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who has studied the deepfake creation ecosystem, called the action a significant win against synthetic nonconsensual intimate imagery, adding that the seized sites also appear inaccessible through VPNs from other locations. Effective intervention, she said, has to target several points at once: the creation tools, their promotion, the hosting infrastructure and the payment and affiliate systems that let operators monetise them.

Benjamin Shultz, lead researcher at the American Sunlight Project, said most videos were existing pornographic films manipulated to swap in the targets' faces, and that many looked like reposts from MrDeepFakes, a platform taken offline after reporters unmasked its creators. On at least two of the seized sites, elected officials had profiles with their name and position alongside a grid of manipulated videos. Shultz's research found 56 European politicians mentioned or appearing on the sites, including 16 US politicians and two based in the UK. Archived versions show some videos were watched tens of thousands of times, and one site claimed to have been online since 2018.

Full report at WIRED.