12 deepfake porn sites just went dark. The people behind them are still unknown
Manhattan prosecutors seized a dozen websites that put around 1,200 people — almost all women — into sexual videos they never filmed. Nobody has been charged yet.
On Monday the Manhattan District Attorney's Office announced it had seized 12 domains used, it says, for "unlawfully" sharing, publishing and selling celebrity deepfake videos. Around 1,200 people appeared in nonconsensual sexual images and videos on those sites. Overwhelmingly women. Not only celebrities: the list includes social media influencers, actors, activists, athletes, musicians and politicians.
Visit one of the addresses now and you get a notice instead of a homepage. WIRED saw several of them swap their front pages for the words "THIS DOMAIN HAS BEEN SEIZED" late last week, under a seizure warrant issued by a New York State Supreme Court. One of the sites claimed it had been online since 2018. Some of the videos on them had been watched tens of thousands of times.
For nearly a decade this industry operated as if it were out of reach. The sites were cheap to run, the faces were free, and the videos — mostly ordinary porn clips with someone else's face swapped in — took seconds to make. The people in them had no realistic way to get them down. What changed here is boring and therefore important: a district attorney's office used state criminal procedure law and a court warrant to take the addresses themselves. Not the uploaders, not the hosting company. The front door.
And the door stayed shut. Leonie Oehmig, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who studies how these sites are built, says the seized sites don't appear to be reachable even through a VPN from other countries. That is the part operators always counted on — that a local law would be a local inconvenience.
A US state just proved the internet has an address, and addresses can be taken.
But nobody has been named. The DA's office has not published the list of seized websites, and its investigations into who ran them — and who uploaded the videos — are still open. Oehmig's point is that domains are only one layer: the apps that generate this content, the places that promote them, the hosting, and the payment systems that let operators get paid all sit outside this action. Twelve sites are gone. The machine that made them is not.
Anyone whose face is online in quantity — which now means almost everyone under 40 who has ever posted a selfie, applied for a job with a photo, or streamed to a few hundred people. The 1,200 people on these sites were influencers, athletes, musicians, activists and politicians, and the source is explicit that this technology is also widely used against non-famous women and girls, often shared in private social media groups. It also matters to anyone deciding whether being visible online is worth it: young women building a following, students whose classmates have a phone, people whose professional life requires a public face. And to the people who have already found themselves in one of these videos and assumed nothing could be done — Alvin Bragg's statement asked exactly those people to contact his office's cybercrime bureau.
Two things to watch, and the source names both. First, whether anyone is charged: the DA's office says its investigations into who is responsible for the sites and who uploaded the videos are ongoing, with no timeline given. Second, whether victims come forward — Bragg publicly urged them to contact the cybercrime bureau. No date, no next hearing, no count of cases has been announced. The office also hasn't named the 12 domains.
The seizure worked because a website needs a name, and a name can be taken by a court. The generators, the group chats and the payment rails don't need names. If the next version of this industry never registers a domain at all, Monday's win becomes a lesson for the people running it rather than a threat to them.
Sources: WIRED, "New York Seizes a Dozen Celebrity Deepfake Websites" by Matt Burgess, September 14, 2026.
Впервые прокуратура штата разом изъяла 12 дипфейк-порносайтов с 1200 жертвами — значит, у закона появился рабочий механизм против индустрии, которая годами считалась неуязвимой, и жертвы не только знаменитости.
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