DOJ Seizes CFAKE, SOCFAKE Deepfake Sites Under TAKE IT DOWN Act

The U.S. Department of Justice announced the seizure of CFAKE.com and SOCFAKE.com, two domains accused of hosting nonconsensual AI-generated nude images and videos of women, in what marks the first publicly confirmed domain takedown under the federal TAKE IT DOWN Act. According to the DOJ, the platforms distributed deepfake pornography depicting politicians, first ladies from multiple countries, royalty, journalists, athletes, entertainers, and television presenters. A federal judge in the District of New Jersey found probable cause that the sites were operating in violation of 47 U.S.C. § 223, prompting Homeland Security Investigations to seize both domains on Thursday in a coordinated operation with French National Police, the Paris Prosecutor's Office, and Italy's Polizia di Stato – Postal and Cybersecurity Police. The seizure banner now displayed on the sites explicitly cites the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which prohibits the nonconsensual publication of intimate imagery and digital forgeries, with violators facing fines, imprisonment, or both.

The investigation was triggered after Italy's Postal and Cybersecurity Police alerted U.S. authorities to the websites. Italian media reports indicate that investigators opened a formal inquiry in October 2025 following complaints about AI-generated sexually explicit images of women in politics, sports, and entertainment. Italian authorities subsequently obtained a court order blocking access to the sites within Italy, while U.S. and French agencies moved to dismantle the infrastructure entirely. The case underscores how deepfake technology, capable of fabricating convincing intimate imagery from a single photograph, has become a weaponized tool for large-scale digital exploitation. Readers concerned about how their personal data and images may be misused online can run a privacy checkup to evaluate their exposure, or perform a WHOIS lookup to investigate suspicious domains they encounter.

Security researchers note that CFAKE and SOCFAKE represent a growing category of AI-enabled abuse infrastructure, where operators leverage generative models to produce synthetic explicit content at industrial scale, often monetized through subscriptions and social media promotion. The DOJ's seizure demonstrates that domain-level enforcement, even across international jurisdictions, is now a viable tactic against deepfake distributors. As the TAKE IT DOWN Act moves from legislation to active enforcement, site operators in this space face substantially elevated legal risk, while potential victims gain a clearer federal pathway to pursue removal. To verify whether a suspicious website is masking its true hosting origin, users can run a DNS leak test or inspect the site's underlying network metadata for signs of proxy and VPN-based obfuscation commonly used by such operations.