New York Seizes 12 Deepfake Porn Sites in the Largest Takedown of Its Kind

Key points

• The Manhattan District Attorney's Office seized 12 domain names, calling it an enforcement action against websites that unlawfully shared and sold celebrity deepfake videos.
• Around 1,200 people, overwhelmingly women, appeared without their consent in sexual images and videos hosted on the sites.
• At least 56 European politicians and 16 US politicians were targeted, according to researcher Benjamin Shultz of the American Sunlight Project.
• Investigators say their work isn't finished: they're still pursuing the people who ran the sites and those who uploaded the videos.
• If you believe you appear in this content, District Attorney Bragg's office is urging victims to contact its cybercrime bureau directly.

The websites had names promising "real deepfakes" and "sex celebrity" content. Some claimed to have been running since 2018. Archived versions show individual videos racked up tens of thousands of views.

Now those pages show a different message: "THIS DOMAIN HAS BEEN SEIZED."

On Monday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced that his office had taken down 12 websites hosting deepfake pornography, meaning fake sexual videos made using artificial intelligence to paste a real person's face onto someone else's body. Wired first observed the seizure notices appearing on the sites late last week.

Who was targeted, and how bad was it?

About 1,200 real people appeared on the sites without their knowledge or consent, including social media influencers, actors, politicians, athletes and musicians.

Researcher Benjamin Shultz, who studies deepfake abuse for the American Sunlight Project, a nonprofit that tracks online disinformation, found that elected officials were given formal profile pages complete with their name, position and a grid of manipulated videos. Fifty-six European politicians appeared on the sites, along with 16 US politicians and two UK-based officials.

Many videos ran several minutes long and were fully explicit, typically swapping a real person's face into an existing pornographic film. Shultz says a large portion of the content appears to have been reposted from MrDeepFakes, a notorious site whose operators were unmasked by reporters and subsequently taken offline. Our 19 August report found Meta running ads for a similar deepfake tool targeting politicians, so this ecosystem has multiple commercial tentacles that a domain seizure won't sever on its own.

What happens next?

The DA's office is still investigating who ran the sites and who uploaded content to them. No arrests or charges have been publicly announced.

Leonie Oehmig, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank studying online harms, told Wired the takedowns are encouraging but warned they address one piece of a much larger puzzle. Effective action, she said, needs to reach the AI tools used to generate images, the payment systems that let operators profit, and the affiliate networks driving traffic. Shutting 12 domains doesn't touch most of that.

Oehmig also confirmed the seized sites weren't reachable even through a VPN, a tool that disguises your internet location to make it appear you're browsing from another country. That matters because it suggests the seizure has genuine technical force rather than just swapping a homepage.

The US Take It Down Act, signed into law earlier this year, gives law enforcement clearer authority to seize sites hosting nonconsensual intimate images, and it was among the legal tools used here.

Should you worry about the wider problem?

The tools to generate this content are cheap and fast. Twelve sites down means dozens more are still online, and as we reported on 24 August, the same technology is already following teachers into their workplaces with institutions having little idea how to respond. These seizures prove enforcement is possible. They aren't a solution.