The Manhattan District Attorney's Office has seized 12 domains that it says were used to unlawfully share, publish and sell celebrity deepfake videos. Announcing the seizures on Monday, the office said around 1,200 people, overwhelmingly women, were depicted in nonconsensual sexual images and videos on the sites, among them social media influencers, actors, activists, athletes, musicians and politicians.
"These horrific violations of privacy follow victims into their careers and personal lives and take an immense toll on emotional and mental well-being," district attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement, urging potential victims to contact his office's cybercrime bureau. The office says investigations into who is responsible for the websites, and into those who uploaded videos of victims, continue.
The seizures were made under New York's criminal procedure laws. The office has not publicly named the sites, but Wired observed several of their homepages being replaced late last week with takedown notices reading "THIS DOMAIN HAS BEEN SEIZED". The pages now say they were taken over following a seizure warrant issued by a New York State Supreme Court.
Millions of views and profiles of elected officials
The sites likely drew millions of views, archived versions show some videos had been watched tens of thousands of times, and one claimed to have been online since 2018. "Most videos took the shape of actual pornographic movies, manipulated to instead show targets' faces instead of the original actors," says Benjamin Shultz, lead researcher at the American Sunlight Project, a nonprofit. Many videos appeared to be reposts of material originally shared on MrDeepFakes, a deepfake platform taken offline after reporters unmasked its creators, Shultz says.
"On at least two of the seized websites, elected officials were given profiles containing their name and position, along with a grid of manipulated videos hosting their likeness," says Shultz, who documents deepfake abuse against political figures. Recent research found that 56 European politicians had been mentioned or appeared on the websites, Shultz says, including 16 US politicians and two based in the UK.
A takedown that leaves the wider industry intact
Laws against deepfakes have been slow to emerge, but the US Take It Down Act increasingly allows images to be removed, and part of the law lets law enforcement take down and seize websites. Such sites have published thousands of nonconsensual videos over close to a decade and, as artificial intelligence has improved, websites, apps and bots built to "undress" photos of women or generate graphic sexual videos have appeared.
"The takedowns are a significant win in the fight against synthetic nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII)," says Leonie Oehmig, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) who studies the deepfake creation ecosystem. Oehmig says enforcement of state laws shows the content can be tackled, and that the seized sites do not appear reachable through virtual private networks (VPNs) from elsewhere. "This shows that meaningful, coordinated enforcement is achievable even where regulation itself remains fragmented across jurisdictions."
Other parts of the industry are still causing serious harm, Oehmig says. "Effective intervention needs to target the ecosystem at multiple points, including the tools used for the creation of synthetic NCII, the discovery and promotion of these, the hosting and technical infrastructure that keeps them online, and the payment and affiliate systems that enable operators to monetize them."