The FBI and French authorities have arrested an individual and seized a pair of websites that were used to disseminate child sexual exploitation material, including AI generated deepfake media, according to court documents.
The websites, NudeLeaksTeens and NLTVIDS, were seized and shut down by the FBI this week. According to the Department of Justice, the cybercrime division of the French Paris Prosecutor’s Office has also arrested an unnamed 25-year-old French resident suspected of being the primary administrator for the sites.
According to a seizure warrant filed Oct. 2 in the Eastern District of Virginia by Arlington County police detective and FBI cybercrime task force member John Bamford, law enforcement first became aware of the websites in 2024, which advertised hacked, leaked and stolen CSAM of young girls.
FBI officials executed a search warrant on VeriSign, a Reston, Virginia-based U.S. domain registry that controls the seized website domains, taking servers, computers and other material.
Together the sites offered “a wide range of explicit content including CSAM and content that violates the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which prohibits the non-consensual sharing of intimate images,” Bamford wrote.
The TAKE IT DOWN Act, passed last year, makes it a crime to create or share nonconsensual “intimate” deepfake media of real people. The law also gives the Federal Trade Commission authority to enforce it and allows courts to order websites to remove such content.