In six months, a handful of websites that "undress" women from a single photo were visited more than 200 million times. The photos were not stolen from anyone: they were ordinary pictures, lifted from social media, to which an artificial intelligence added nudity that never existed.
The good news is that ten of those sites are now offline, following a lawsuit by the San Francisco City Attorney. The bad news is the number nobody celebrates: 200 million visits in half a year tell you the problem was never supply, it was demand. And demand does not switch off with a court ruling.
Shutting a site down is easy. Killing the demand is not.
In August 2024, David Chiu, the San Francisco City Attorney, sued the operators of sixteen "nudify" sites, the name given to the tools that "undress" a person in an image, in the first action of its kind. Since then, ten of those sites have become inaccessible in California, and one of them, Briver, shut down under a settlement, with a permanent injunction barring it from operating again and a $100,000 penalty.
On the legal side, in May 2025 the United States passed the Take It Down Act, which makes it a federal crime to publish nonconsensual intimate images, including those manufactured by AI, the so-called "deepfakes," digital fabrications that look real. The law also forces platforms to remove the content within 48 hours, and the first conviction came in April 2026. That is real progress, but it is progress against the factory, not against what it has already produced.
In Portugal, it already reached the classroom. The law only arrives in 2027.
In November 2025, the Judicial Police (Polícia Judiciária) said publicly that these cases had started appearing in Portuguese schools. The pattern repeats: a student takes a classmate's photo from Instagram, runs it through an app that "removes her clothes," and circulates the result in the class WhatsApp group. And the police themselves stressed the most disturbing part: many of these teenagers think it is "a joke." It is not, and it is exactly that misunderstanding that lets the problem grow unnoticed.
Worse, Portugal currently has no specific crime for this at all. Spreading a fake sexual image only becomes expressly criminal once the country transposes the European directive that requires it, Directive 2024/1385, whose deadline runs to June 2027. Until then, investigators fit each case into whatever legal categories they have at hand.
This is where the "site shut down" image misleads. One of these fabrications does not live on the server you switch off, it lives on the phone of whoever received it, in the group where it was forwarded, and in the folder of whoever saved it. Shutting the site is seizing the factory after the product is already distributed, and the product here is people: roughly nine in ten victims are women and girls, and many of both the victims and the offenders are children of fourteen and fifteen.
How to protect your own.
There is no button that erases this from the world, but there are concrete things that cut the damage:
- Talk to younger people before there is a case. Creating or forwarding one of these images of a classmate is violence and carries legal consequences, and anyone treating it as a joke needs to hear, from someone close, that it is not.
- Cut public exposure. Locked profiles and restraint with photos of minors take raw material away from those hunting for targets.
- Do not delete the evidence. If you were a victim, keep screenshots, links, dates, and a record of who sent it, because that chain is what supports a complaint.
- Use the takedown tools. StopNCII.org (for adults) and NCMEC's Take It Down (for minors) help pull intimate images from the big platforms, and the networks have their own reporting channels.
- Report it. In Portugal, to the Judicial Police and the Internet Segura helpline, because silence is the only guaranteed ally the offender has.
The right question is not how many sites will close next week. It is when we stop treating undressing a classmate with one click as a prank and start treating it as what it is: an assault committed with a phone that stays forever.
Source: Malwarebytes (Lock and Code).
#StaySafe
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