Manhattan DA seizes 12 deepfake sites: what removal achieves
By
Ceartas Team
The Manhattan District Attorney's Office has seized the domains of twelve websites that sold AI generated sexual images of people who never consented to them. According to the office's own announcement, the material depicted around 1,200 people, including actors, politicians, athletes, musicians, social justice advocates and social media influencers, and overwhelmingly women.
No arrests or charges have been announced. The people behind the sites are described as under investigation. The office also says it will continue to monitor these websites to prevent them operating under different domains.
That last sentence is the one worth reading twice, and this piece is mostly about why.
Seizing a domain is not the same as hiding a page
It is worth being clear about what actually happened here, because the distinction gets blurred constantly.
There are broadly two ways to make harmful material stop reaching people. You can make it harder to find, by getting it out of search results. Or you can remove the thing itself, at the place it lives, so there is nothing at the other end of the link.
The first is useful. It cuts the traffic, and for a lot of material it is the fastest lever available. It also leaves the file exactly where it was, reachable by anyone who has the address, and reachable again the moment it gets shared somewhere search does not reach.
What the Manhattan DA's office did is the second kind. The sites did not get demoted. They lost their domains. That is removal at source, and it is the difference between a page that is inconvenient to find and a page that is not there.
Why this does not end with twelve domains
Here is the difficulty, and the DA's office named it themselves rather than leaving it to anyone else.
The operators are not the material. Taking a domain removes a storefront. The underlying files, and the tools that made them, are not in the storefront.
Reopening is easy and cheap. A new domain costs very little and takes minutes. The commitment to keep monitoring exists precisely because the office expects an attempt.
A prosecutor acts once, at a moment. Seizure is an event with a date. Recurrence is a condition with no end date. Those are different shapes of problem, and only one of them can be solved by a single action however well executed.
The scale is already uneven. Around 1,200 people were affected by twelve sites. The number of people who would need to be watching, permanently, for those 1,200 is not twelve.
None of that makes the seizure less valuable. It makes it a beginning that needs a follow through, which is exactly how the office appears to be treating it.
What someone in this position can actually do
If material like this involves you, or someone you represent, a few things genuinely help. None of it is your fault, and none of it is something you should have to handle by yourself.
Write it down before anything else. Dates, URLs, where you saw it, what you did about it. A record is what every later route depends on, and it is much harder to build after the fact.
Use the platforms' own reporting routes for non consensual intimate imagery. These are separate from ordinary content reports, they are treated differently, and they exist for exactly this.
Get someone else involved early. A manager, a lawyer, a trusted colleague, a specialist service. Handling this alone is the version that costs the most, and it is the most common version.
Expect that it may reappear, and plan for that rather than being ambushed by it. Knowing recurrence is normal is not pessimism. It is what stops a second sighting feeling like starting from zero.
Look after yourself while it is happening. This is a genuinely distressing thing to deal with, and treating the emotional side as a distraction from the practical side helps nobody. Support is worth asking for.
How Ceartas handles it
The gap this case points at is not enforcement. Enforcement did its job here, and visibly. The gap is the space between one action and the next appearance, which nobody is staffed to watch on behalf of 1,200 people.
That is the part we take on. Ceartas is your digital bodyguard. We look for synthetic and stolen material that uses your likeness across the sites and platforms where it actually ends up, and we do it continuously rather than when somebody happens to notice.
When we find something, we start the removal immediately, on the legal and platform policy grounds that apply, and we push for removal at the source rather than settling for it being harder to find. Then we keep watching. When the same material resurfaces somewhere new, which it does, it goes back through the same process without you having to find it first.
We cannot promise that a platform or a host will act straight away, because removal depends on their processing times. What we can say is that nobody should have to be their own monitoring service, and that the watching is the part that does not stop.
Your likeness is yours. Protect your image.
If fakes of you are already online, see how our deepfake removal service finds them and requests removal at the host.
This story is part of our deepfake laws and cases tracker, which follows every new law, ruling and platform move on the topic.
