Manhattan DA seizes 12 domains hosting nonconsensual celebrity deepfake pornography

The Manhattan District Attorney's Office executed New York State Supreme Court seizure warrants against 12 domains that hosted, published and sold nonconsensual deepfake pornographic videos of roughly 1,200 people, mostly women, including celebrities, activists, athletes and politicians. The sites' homepages now display "THIS DOMAIN HAS BEEN SEIZED" notices, and WIRED independently observed this before the DA's announcement. Investigations into site operators and uploaders are ongoing, but the DA has not named the domains, and no arrests or charges have been confirmed in this reporting.

This is a concrete, court-authorised state-level enforcement action, not a policy announcement or a company's voluntary takedown, which matters for trust-and-safety teams and lawmakers gauging whether nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) laws are actually enforceable. It gives other state DAs and prosecutors a working precedent and playbook for going after hosting infrastructure directly. The direct impact on ordinary people is limited for now: it removes 12 sites but does nothing to the tools that create deepfakes, the platforms that promote them, or the payment processors that monetise them, so operators can likely resurface elsewhere.

"Largest takedown to date" is an unverified superlative with no baseline comparison given, and total site traffic or victim reach is described as "estimated" rather than measured. The framing implies a turning point in deepfake enforcement, but the article itself concedes this only hits one node (hosting) in a multi-part ecosystem, with creation tools, promotion channels and payment rails untouched.

1. 01Whether the DA names the seized domains and confirms any arrests or criminal charges against operators or uploaders in the coming weeks
2. 02Whether the seized sites reappear under new domains or offshore hosting within 1-3 months, which would test how durable this takedown actually is
3. 03Whether other state attorneys general or DAs cite this action and file similar seizure warrants within the next 6-12 months