Federal agents have pulled the plug on two notorious deepfake porn hubs, seizing their website domains after a judge found probable cause that they were hosting thousands of nonconsensual AI-generated nude images and videos of women. CFAKE.com and SOCFAKE.com now show federal seizure banners after warrants were executed. Homeland Security Investigations’ New Jersey field office ran point on the operation with help from the Department of Justice and international partners, and the sweep included an arrest in Nice, France. Prosecutors say they relied on new powers in the TAKE IT DOWN Act to target the deepfake pornography sites.
According to a Justice Department press release, the domains carried hundreds of thousands of digitally forged images and videos featuring famous women, including politicians, journalists and entertainers, and let users browse by tags such as "rape," "forced" and "degradation." The DOJ said a federal judge in the District of New Jersey signed off on seizure warrants after finding probable cause that the sites were violating federal law under the new statute.
U.S. Attorney Robert Frazer for the District of New Jersey blasted the operation as "a website that trafficked in humiliation, exploitation, and the violation of personal privacy on a massive scale," adding that his office helped knock out the infrastructure that allowed the abuse to flourish. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Newark filed a probable-cause affidavit in court and attached a PDF of the seizure warrant to the case record.
The case is one of the first to lean on the TAKE IT DOWN Act, a federal law that took effect in May 2025 and, as AP News explains, makes it a crime to knowingly publish sexually explicit digital forgeries of identifiable adults without their consent and forces platforms to remove flagged material quickly. The law’s short notice-and-removal deadlines and new criminal penalties were drafted with large, specialized operations like these in mind, prosecutors noted.
Investigators did not stumble on the sites by accident. Italian cyber police first tipped off U.S. authorities, and by sharing evidence under the Budapest Convention, French officials arrested a suspect in Nice on June 10 and seized cryptocurrency linked to the scheme, CyberScoop reported. Prosecutors told CyberScoop that the French investigation logged hundreds of thousands of images, thousands of videos and about 200,000 user accounts tied to the platforms.
What This Means for Victims and Platforms
The takedown is also a stress test for how criminal prosecutions and platform rules will mesh under the new regime. The Federal Trade Commission began enforcing the TAKE IT DOWN Act’s platform obligations in May and has signaled that it is watching how companies respond. In recent guidance, the FTC urged platforms to set up straightforward reporting and removal processes and warned that failures to act could trigger civil penalties.
For people who suspect they were depicted in deepfake sexual content without consent, federal officials point to several routes. Victims are encouraged to file a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, known as IC3, and to use both platform reporting tools and the FTC’s TakeItDown portal to document and push removal requests. IC3 and the FTC outline what evidence to gather, while AP and law enforcement notices advise keeping usernames, URLs and screenshots to help investigators.
Civil-liberties advocates have warned that the law’s tight takedown timelines could be abused or overused, particularly in borderline cases, but victims’ groups and investigators counter that shuttering entire sites that profit from nonconsensual deepfake material is a significant win. CyberScoop reported that prosecutors see this as one of the largest operations of its kind so far, and say it could influence how countries coordinate on future cases involving AI-powered image abuse.
