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Manhattan's DA seizes 12 deepfake domains that depicted about 1,200 people
New York took the domains under its own criminal procedure laws, the layer a state prosecutor can reach. Many of the videos on them were reposts from an older site, and the DA says its investigation into who ran them is open.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- The Manhattan District Attorney's Office said on Monday it had seized 12 domains it says were used for unlawfully sharing, publishing and selling celebrity deepfake videos.
- Around 1,200 people, overwhelmingly women, were depicted in nonconsensual sexual images and videos on the sites, the office says, among them influencers, actors, activists, athletes, musicians and politicians.
- Wired says it saw several of the sites' homepages replaced late last week by notices reading "THIS DOMAIN HAS BEEN SEIZED", citing a seizure warrant issued by a New York State Supreme Court.
- The office has not publicly named the domains it seized.
- Archived copies of the sites show some videos had been watched tens of thousands of times, and one site claimed to have been online since 2018, according to Wired.
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Why it matters
- capability A prosecutor can act on the domain itself, so removal stops depending on whether a site operator answers a request; Wired notes the Take It Down Act also lets law enforcement take down and seize websites.
- constraint A domain seizure leaves the video files with whoever holds them, and the reposting pattern Shultz describes means the same library can be standing up again under new names.
- exposure With the domains unnamed, a woman who wants to know whether she was among the 1,200 has to ask the cybercrime bureau and wait for an answer.
- precedent Oehmig's VPN check hands prosecutors in other states a result to cite when they argue a single state's seizure can hold outside its own borders.
Benjamin Shultz, lead researcher at the American Sunlight Project, told Wired that many of the videos on the seized sites appeared to be reposts of material first shared on MrDeepFakes, the platform that went offline after reporters unmasked its creators [14]. "Most videos took the shape of actual pornographic movies, manipulated to instead show targets' faces instead of the original actors," Shultz said [13]. The material behind these 12 domains had already outlived one site's closure before it got there [14][1].
Twelve domains and around 1,200 depicted people works out at roughly 100 identifiable people per site [1][2][17]. Wired described the action as likely the largest takedown of explicit deepfake websites to date [20]. District attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement that "these horrific violations of privacy follow victims into their careers and personal lives and take an immense toll on emotional and mental well-being" [4].
One obvious workaround appears to have failed. Leonie Oehmig, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who has studied the deepfake creation ecosystem, says the seized sites do not appear to be accessible when using VPNs to reach them from other locations [11]. She called the seizures "a significant win in the fight against synthetic nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII)" [10], and said: "This shows that meaningful, coordinated enforcement is achievable even where regulation itself remains fragmented across jurisdictions" [12].
A federal route exists in parallel. Wired notes that the US Take It Down Act increasingly allows images to be removed, and that part of the law lets law enforcement officials take down and seize websites [9]. New York used its own criminal procedure laws [3]. Wired's account covers the domains and the warrant, and reports no action against a hosting provider or a payment processor, even though the office says the sites were used for selling the videos [19][1].
For a trust and safety team, or a lawyer advising someone who has found herself on one of these sites, the useful question about any takedown is which of three things it actually removed: the domain name, the files, or the operator. This action removed 12 names [1]. The files moved once already [14]. Operators are unidentified on this record, with the office saying its investigations into who is responsible, and into who uploaded the videos, are ongoing [6]. And the public sites are one part of the problem: the same technology is widely used against non-famous women and girls, whose images are often shared in private social media groups [21].
What to watch
- Whether the DA names the seized domains or charges an operator, with both investigations still open.
- Whether the same video libraries reappear under fresh domains, as they did after MrDeepFakes closed.
- Whether prosecutors in other states copy the state criminal-procedure route instead of using the federal Take It Down Act.