High-profile Deepnude Sites Seized in Action Against Gen-AI Sex Crimes
High-profile deepnude sites CFAKE.com and SOCFAKE.com have been taken down in an international collaboration targeted at AI-driven sex crimes by judicial authorities across the US, Italy, and France. The sites were used to host thousands of non-consensual AI-generated images of women in the nude and engaged in sexual activity. The websites allowed visitors to browse by tags that included topics “rape,” “forced,” and “degradation.”
The investigation was a collaboration between the US Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, Italy’s Polizia di Stato Postal and Cybersecurity Police, and the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office, Cybercrime Section (J3) and French gendarmerie.
Generative-AI enables digital sex crimes at scale
Authorities identified 300,000 images, and 7,000 videos depicting 14,000 individuals from different countries. The site had approximately 200,000 end user accounts, 4 million views per month, and uploaded 50 pieces of new content every day. Many of the victims were celebrities or women in the public eye.
The hundreds of thousands of images and videos were either manipulated by AI, using techniques like face swaps, or synthetically-generated using an authentic source, like a photograph.
US-based website infrastructure was seized for federal criminal violations of the TAKE IT DOWN Act, a statute enacted in May 2025. The TAKE IT DOWN Act makes it a federal crime to publish digital forgeries, known as deepnudes, that appear to depict an identifiable adult in a sexually explicit manner without the depicted person’s consent.
The criminalization of deepfake pornography is a trend that has really only appeared in the last 12 months, in line with the democratization of deepfake generation through ready access to sophisticated and user-friendly generative-AI tools. Trained on even a single source image, these deepfake generators enable criminals to operate at the scale seen above, churning out hundreds of thousands of convincing images, videos, and audio with ease.
The investigation into the sites CFAKE.com and SOCFAKE.com was launched in October 2025 following several reports received by Italy’s Polizia di Stato. The US then developed evidence that it was able to share with French authorities through use of the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, resulting in an arrest on June 10 in Nice, France on French criminal charges along with seizures of $48,000 in cryptocurrency.
Cyrille B., a 47-year-old French national was arrested on suspicion of being an administrator for the websites.
“These seizures stopped a website that trafficked in humiliation, exploitation, and the violation of personal privacy on a massive scale,” said US Attorney Robert Frazer for the District of New Jersey. “For the victims whose images were distributed without their consent, the harm is not virtual — it is deeply personal and often enduring.”
What is the impact of deepfake crime on law enforcement?
It’s now typical for digital forensics units to face thousands of files per case, including non-consensual deepfake pornography used for sextortion, AI-generated sexual harassment, and maliciously edited videos. These manipulations threaten judicial integrity and can mislead and overwhelm even experienced analysts without advanced verification tools.
Forensic analysts are feeling the pain when speed matters as much as accuracy, and every hour spent validating manipulated content with outdated deepfake detection tools is an hour lost for victim protection, takedowns, or suspect identification.
Fundamentally, the ease with which malicious media can either be manipulated or completely fabricated is changing the nature of how forensic authenticity is handled in terms of deepfake detection. Given the volumes and sophistication involved it can no longer be treated as a late-stage expert opinion, but must be addressed instead as an automated verification step early in the process.
Law enforcement and judiciary authorities are still getting to grips with technological developments that are fast outpacing the law. Few countries are leading the charge, but possibly none more so than South Korea, where the National Police Agency (NPA) made 682 arrests over deepfake sex crimes in 2024-2025. However, more than 80% were minors, many of which are exempt from criminal prosecution, highlighting the social challenges of gen-AI tools being made available to everyone, including children and teens. According to the South Korean police, a total of 1,202 deepfake-related sex crime cases were recorded within the same time frame.
