Exposing the People Behind Deepfake Porn Sites with Bellingcat Investigator Kolina Koltai

25:24Quince has everything you need. From Mongolian cashmere sweaters, wool coats, leather and suede outerwear that actually holds up to daily wear and still looks good. Their outerwear is particularly impressive. Think down jackets, wool coats, and Italian leather outerwear that keep you warm when it's actually cold. Each piece is made from premium materials by trusted factories that meet rigorous standards for craftsmanship and ethical production. By cutting out middlemen and traditional markups, Quince delivers the same quality as luxury brands at a fraction of the price. The result is classic styles that you love and hold up year after year.

26:00I was thinking the other day and I was realizing that Quince is slowly taking over my entire wardrobe. It started with t-shirts, linen button downs like this one, and other effortlessly cool basics over the summer. And as we got into the winter, I picked up my favorite pair of sneakers, which I wear almost every day. and I usually pair it with a 100 % cotton sweater that I also wear pretty much every day. I really can't wait to get more Quince at this point, so go check them out. Refresh your winter wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com slash 404media for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns.

26:34Now available in Canada too. That's q-u-i-n-c-e.com slash 404media. Free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash 404media. Now that the holidays are over, you might feel like you've got a bit of a spending hangover. Between the drinks, the food, the gifts, it all adds up really fast. That's exactly why Mint Mobile has been clutch for me this January. Because they're helping people cut back on overspending on wireless with 50 % off unlimited premium wireless plans. It's my favorite type of cutting back. The kind where I save money, don't have to do much, and still get essentially the same service for much less money.

27:16Mint Mobile's end-of-the-year sale is still going on, but just till the end of this month. Cut out Big Wireless's bloated plans and unnecessary monthly charges with 50 % off 3, 6, or 12 months of unlimited. All plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. Use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts. I switched to Mint Mobile from Big Wireless. And honestly, the difference has been wild. Not in the service, but in the price. I'm getting the same quality coverage I had before, but I'm paying way less every month.

27:53No bloated plans, no random charges, no nonsense. Their end of the year sale is still going on, but only until the end of the month. You can get 50 % off 3, 6, or 12 months of unlimited. And every plan comes with high-speed data plus unlimited talk and text. I used my own phone, kept my number, and all my contacts transferred over seamlessly. Zero hassle. This January, quit overspending on wireless with 50 % off unlimited premium wireless. Plans start at$15 a month at mintmobile.com slash 404media. That's mintmobile.com slash 404media. Limited time offer. Upfront payment of$45 for three months, $90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required.

28:36That's$15 a month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan terms only. Over 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. CementMobile.com.

28:58So you have all these smoking guns, basically. You have all these direct leads to this guy, Resan, and next you have to try to reach him, right? So what do you do at that point? You're like, we have to contact this guy. We have to get comment as part of doing our due diligence. So what happens at that point? Yeah, at that point, we send emails. And we have, fortunately, lots of different emails for him, businesses. So we sent emails to his emails, to his business emails. So like Dorakron's email, Vasitic's email, and multiple times. We gave him multiple chances across multiple emails. So we sent out one, no response.

29:43We wait a little bit. We sent out another one. Give him a say like, hey, we need a response by this time. Please respond to us. And nothing. But we did notice that sites were taken offline. He started trying to delete things. as soon as he was reached out to us, things began to like tighten down. And so we know that he saw them. Like, I don't think there's any doubt in my mind that he's seen those. He's never responded to us. One of the interesting components about this is that there were like archives. So we, you know, we use the internet wayback machine. It's wonderful. People haven't used that.

30:16It's a great way to look at archived history of websites. And so there were already archives of this site, you know, scraped through internet archive. And you could have, in theory, so like, oh, look at the evidence that's on here. That's archived. It's timestamped. This is what the site looked like. But in the process, right before we published, we saw that all the archives were gone on there. And we're like, huh, that's weird. So we emailed Internet Archive saying, hey, did you guys take this down? Because it is actually possible. I don't think people know that you can if you're the owner of a website, request your site to be removed.

30:52And they did confirm to us that the owner of the site requested that those sites that we identified were removed, which we then emailed Mark saying like, hey, did you get these removed? We saw. Which, again, he did not respond. And so he very clearly was, I think, ashamed and tried to hide a little bit that he was identified. He's trying to cover up his tracks. you know that's why also having redundancy and archiving and history of stuff is so important but yeah he never respond a lot of these guys never respond they just try to run and hide I don't think they are no one wants to come out and be proud and be like yes I'm the owner of this site right and the thing is it's not illegal yet where he's what he's doing right it's not like there'd be any penalty so yeah he could just keep going at without for now at least without without facing any consequences, which is crazy.

31:47I think it's so satisfying when you reach out to someone for comment and they start cleaning their shit. I'm like, I see you changing your LinkedIn place of work. I see you making little changes to your website, things like that, or taking the website down altogether, which I would love to talk about just like the feeling after one of these sorts of sites goes down because like we said earlier, it's a problem that's getting worse. It's just increasingly spreading and harmful and something that a lot of times we don't see any recourse for victims or any movement in the direction of accountability or responsibility or anything.

32:26So when one of these investigations essentially gets the site shut down, that's so huge. So I would love to hear that from your point of view. Just how did it feel when you saw these sites were gone? And not only gone, but like gone from the archives, gone entirely no trace. Yeah, you're right. It is so satisfying. Like it is such a way because ultimately that's one of the things I want to be the end result of these investigations. I want the sites to come down. I don't want people to be able to use that site for any additional services. I don't want them to make money on it. It feels like that's like our impact in a sense, you know.

33:06We have on our internal work communication system on Slack, we have a channel that's impact. And to me, that is the impact. The site has come down. It's proof. We know that we were right in identifying him. We know that he has some shame on that. And he's going to do the thing, which is that we wanted, ultimately, is the site to come down. And so we've seen this happen across a variety of sites when someone's identified as the site go down. I think this one is a huge one because it's a generation service. The other really big one that came down after we reached out to them was the Mr. Beat fake sites.

33:40That was, I think, one of the biggest really big ones for us is that site coming down because it also hosted so much content. And I will say, unfortunately, it doesn't always happen. Like when we, some sites stay up totally working. And also some sites kind of end up just like dying and being left to sit and rot. And I think that's the part that's also very frustrating is there's a variety of sites that I know that I've followed through investigations. that like they might have switched hands or sold and then slowly just kind of like stop maintaining the sites. But those sites will still actively host those content because they didn't turn the site offline.

34:13So even though you can't use the site anymore, some of them will just still have tons of deep fake imagery that are up there, but no one there to maintain it. It just sits there. And it's frustrating because like take the site down. You've lost, you're not using the site anymore, but you're going to leave the harm up. And I think that's also like one of the frustrations. I'm happy that the site is dead. The company's dead. People have abandoned that project. But nothing beats the sort of satisfaction of the site actually being removed. Yeah, so good. And the Mr. Deepfake situation was so good.

34:48If people aren't familiar, it was an investigation that was, I think, weeks in the making, right? Definitely at least. Or years. Yeah, years. Years in the making. It came out in May 2025. It was the headline that Bellingcat had was Unmasking Mr. Deepfake's Canadian Pharmacist Linked to World's Most Notorious Deepfake Foreign Site. And that was a collaboration between Bellingcat, CBC and CheckDot. And am I missing anybody? I think politics as well. Yeah. Okay. So it was a multi-newsroom effort and so impressive. they uncovered the man behind Mr. Deepix and it ended up being this guy who is a pharmacist in Canada.

35:35And CBC sent a reporter out with a camera and found him in his Tesla at his house, which is such a crazy, crazy video. And I think it's so interesting and ironic that these guys are so scared of being unmasked or unveiled or identified. in public when they're making so much money off of women's likenesses without their consent. And they're so scared of being on camera or named or anything. It's like you are profiting off of the identities of thousands of women every day. You know, are we going to acknowledge that? No, we're just going to drive away in the Tesla. Crazy. And Mr. Deepfakes, I guess, just to get back to the point, went down after that investigation, after he was cornered and caught, the site completely went down and is not up.

36:27I haven't checked today, but I do check it once in a while, but it's gone, which is huge for the women whose images were on it because I think a lot of the time targets of deepfakes just want the imagery to stop. They don't care as much sometimes about the person facing consequences. They just want it gone. They want it to stop being produced. They want it to stop being spread. And like when a hub like this goes down, when the ones that you investigated that we've been talking about go down when Mr. Dpix, which is huge, was like a tutorial site in addition to hosting, go down. That's just massive impact.

37:01So yeah, kudos to Bellingcat. Kudos to you. It's just such important work. So I guess just to ask some more existential questions now that we've established where we're at in this space. And speaking of just impact, I guess, why do you feel like this reporting is important to keep doing? Like, why does this matter when you're kind of like, oh my God, I can't believe this is happening again. What kind of keeps you doing it? You know, that's, that's a great question. Um, you know, I, I think it matters, you know, uh, I, I think it's when you see the site go down, when you see it happening and you're like a change has happened and this site would not have gone down there.

37:43It doesn't matter what kind of email But it wouldn't take until I'm going to identify you. We are going to publish your name and say that you're the owner of this site. Does anything happen? And I wish that would happen for all sites that kind of have ties to this. We don't have to do an investigation of who's the owner of X. We already know who that is. So it's more investigation or something else would need to happen in that case. But for these types of sites, right? David Doe, who is that Canadian pharmacist, 36-year-old guy, looks otherwise like a normal regular life. You know, family guy, had a partner, pharmacist job, like just a dude in Canada, right?

38:23Canadians who are supposed to be all these like nice guys. Canadians are everywhere and many of them are up to some stuff. Some stuff, yeah. Yeah, it didn't, that was like a really, I think, wonderful investigation to be a part of because it was such a huge effort across many people. And I think we had so much redundancy and so much checking on that, that to be sure, because that was going to be a really big publicly named that. We were staking our careers. Like, if we were wrong, that would have been like, that's it. I would have just like left. It's been like, that's it for a big journalist.

38:59But I think, you know, it took until him being cornered by CBC. We were like, we were trying to track him. And also when we're trying to corner him, like we went, they went to initially his work to try to talk to him. And he wouldn't talk. They did letters, they did emails, tons of communication. Like, gave him every single opportunity to, like, defend himself or deny or say anything to get a lawyer. We were about to, like, go. They were about to go to his home and he was, like, gone. And we're like, oh, no, did he flee the country? And then we were tracking his Airbnb profile and saw that he was traveling in Europe.

39:32And we're like, should we send someone to Europe? We have colleagues in Europe. Like, should we just go and, like, doorknock while he's on vacation? which is one thing we thought about um but yeah and they honestly kind of it kind of felt like a little like movie suspense because they had um a team come and like sit by the house wait check to see if the lights were on for real uh yeah like a stakeout like really like like police work and like the police wouldn't do any of this anyway so it's like i guess it's up to you know journalists to go do it and yeah it's it took until like you know repeatedly repeatedly repeatedly giving him every opportunity to say anything, any defense.

40:10And he wouldn't, he would just like not want to talk to the team. So, you know, we, we published his name and, or said like, we'd say, Hey, we're going to publish on this date. And the day before we published site went offline. And I think that means so much, right. That means like we weren't falsely accusing the wrong guy. We gave this person every single opportunity. And he knew that he wasn't going to be able to handle it, right? So he took the site off why. You know, he said like, oh, because of like, other things. But we know it's, we gave you a deadline and you turn it off the date beforehand.

40:42And we don't threaten to say you should turn off the site, I'll be clear. Like, these are choices that these owners are making. We don't say like, take off the site or we're going to publish your identity. We just say, hey, this is what we're publishing as you as the owner, anything you want to say for yourself, and they decide to run and hide. And I think, you know, that is, it's such a rush. But you have to do it because on a site like that, they had thousands and thousands of videos. That site had been up since 2018. It was the largest site that hosted non-consensual deepfake pornography, particularly around celebrities.

41:19But they also had a Forbes site, and that is where it got really, really awful because that's where people asked for bespoke materials. Like, here's an image I have of this woman. It's like my classmate, a friend's girlfriend or someone like people would ask and get custom stuff made wasn't just about celebrity content um and i i think the harm that site caused over years years you know we can never undo that harm but at least now less harm is being created and being perpetrated because imagine you have a video on there and and sometimes it's people who aren't like particularly famous like sometimes small-time youtubers that only have like you know 5 000 followers you know they're not we're not just talking about a Scarlett Johansson.

41:59We're talking about, you know, people who might be like a regular person. Like there's journalists who've been on there. You know, it's like anyone who is just trying to have a career in a space online could be a victim. And it's overwhelmingly women. And it's not just say, oh, because I'm a woman, I feel for this. I think anyone could feel for this, you know? You don't have to have your identity tied to seeing that the harm that's being done and that can continue to harm you in ways beyond it. Because like, you know, Images and videos that originated on that site could continue to spread on the internet.

42:28It's really hard sometimes to put a cap on those sort of things. And as much as a whack-a-mole game, it could feel between these big sites and the small sites, we need more people doing this work. I'm just one woman. We're just one organization. I am not trying to gatekeep how to do this work or how to be the only person doing this investigation. Anyone is capable of doing these type of investigations because it is open source. We're using things that are available on the internet out there to be able to investigate the ownership of these sites. And I think that's what's also incredibly powerful is that you can do something.

43:06I think in a world where we feel so powerless about so much is happening. I live in the U.S., like many, many people, and there's a lot of awful stuff, a ton of awful stuff every single day that's happening. And you feel powerless to do something about it. This work gives me some power, some agency that something can be done. By identifying these owners, they get so ashamed, so scared that they turn off the site. You know, they run and hide. Those sites die. And that is an impact that gets me up every single day. Yeah. Yes. And especially, like you mentioned, the police often do not do anything.

43:46Reporting this stuff to the police does not actually do anything in a lot of cases. not to say that you shouldn't try but in Canada it's not even there's not even any law in the books about preventing date fakes or preventing the harm from them so again it's like he could have just left it up but the shame that he must have felt and you know the threat of being identified essentially by a journalist and by investigators is what took that site down ultimately not you know any kind of action from authorities or from Canada or from legislation, it was journalists and investigators doing really hard work and really staying on it and not just saying, oh, well, we can't find them, never mind, which many people have done throughout the years that that site has been online.

44:33I haven't even tried to figure out who was on it or who was running it because I was like, this seems like something Bellingcat should do, which is often something that crosses my mind. So I admire Bellingcat's work so, so much. And I admire the attitude of everyone should be doing this. Everyone should know how to be doing this kind of work because the more people want it, the better. It's not a competition. It's very much open to whoever wants to kind of look into this stuff in a responsible way and in a way that's safe. And I think your work is exemplifying that in a really important way. So I'm going to leave it at that note because I think it's a positive and optimistic one in a topic that is very dark and depressing.

45:14thing so is there anything else that we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention i know we haven't talked about grok but um that is also you know like you said we don't need to unmask him or anything yeah i mean like the grok thing is so interesting uh because you know i'm glad that there's like steam that's happening you know like there's there's traction that's happening and that's what it takes it's like people being upset you know i i kind of hate the phrase like keyboard warrior but sometimes it does take a lot of just like people talking about it continuously putting the pressure on.

45:45It's like, if, if to me, when I think about the grok situation, if AIC Sam isn't the, the line, isn't the bar, then where is it? I mean, that is usually like, you know, cannot essential pornography of minors is usually where everyone's on saying that, Hey, that's not good. You know, I don't think you have to like do a whole sort of like, you know, in academia, train like, Oh, you should have a whole section of why this work is important and why this care and like why we should, you know, say invest in it or why should we read your art? Like there's a whole side, like why do people care about your work?

46:19And your work is usually so nice and you have to really make a strong argument. There shouldn't be any need to make a strong argument. All I have to say is like non-consensual deep fake pornography of minors. What is the argument for that? Yeah. You know? Yeah, yeah. I thought we were protecting the children here. Like what happened to those voices? And the idea of like, oh, we're just going to like ban a user from that. That is not enough. that is so inefficient with, oh, we're just going to ban somebody. But the technology. And I think that's the thing I wish. There are laws. There's a lot of these times, nothing happens to these guys, right?

46:52Besides their name maybe being out there. Like I would say like even at Outlet Valley Cat, we can never really like even like publish a person's face because of like we're based in the Netherlands. And so we have really strong data privacy protection rules about what we can say and not to say. If I was at an American outlet, probably be like, here's his face. Here's his name. Here's all this other information. We can't even do that. Like, we give these guys more rights and protections than they have afforded the women that are victims of their size, right? Like, we don't, like, Mark Rieson, we didn't even put his face on it, right?

47:23Like, his, and his technology, it's like, put your face on anything, you know? It'd be, not that I'm saying African people make content of him, deep fake content. But I'm just saying that, like, there is so much we need to do legislatively, which is slow and processed. And everything is my one sort of like thing I want to advocate for everyone is that there is a lot of wonderful laws. I don't know. I don't say wonderful laws. There's a lot of laws that are coming down the pipeline and that are put in place, like, say, give more rights to victims, which is fantastic. The other thing, the major gap in legislation and consequences is that these websites are not illegal.

48:00This kind of technology has zero regulation, zero laws. Owning a website like this is not illegal. Like there's no consequences for that. And to me, that is insane. That, you know, we've put in some now laws and like, hey, creating the content and distributing that content is against the law, but profiting off that content isn't, right? And I think that is the thing we need because in all the kind of components that are standing about this kind of work and these kinds of sites, I think most people are in this because they know it's profitable. They know you can make money. This guy in Hungary made hundreds of thousands of dollars off the site.

48:42He did it not because he loves deepfake pornography. I mean, he might love deepfake pornography. But I'm sure that considering he had all these other businesses, all these other random ventures, that he's in it to make money. And we need to make it harder for these guys to make money off of it. Because otherwise, then they'll just go to something else. It all comes to money and power at the end of the day. And I think we cannot ignore that as part of the solutions in tackling the issue. So we need to add friction to that process. We need to add consequences to these actions more than just shame.

49:18Because shame will be great for the Mr. Deepfakes guy or Deepfake Porn, all these other briefcase porn, but it's not going to take down our big players. We need to basically make this so toxic to touch. Like having like child pornography on your computer, like no one wants child pornography on their computer. But why is AIC Sam okay to have on your platform or a service that creates the child pornography? Is that okay? You know, and I don't, I don't mean to be brutish, but it just, that should be the bare minimum line. What an extreme take. Hot take. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, and I think that's a question that a lot of people are waking up to and are asking themselves now.

50:00With the Grok situation is like, why is this allowed? And why is he allowed to do this? Why is Elon Musk allowed to run the platform in the way that he's running it right now? And blatantly asked for subscriptions. If you want to make if you want to make this horrible content, you have to pay him to do it in a lot of cases. Or I think that he turned that off. But yeah, it's just it's so in your face. The answer should not be more clear that this is unacceptable, but somehow it's acceptable for the billionaires among us to do it. So, all right, we are going to leave that there. I've kept you long enough.

50:33Thank you so, so much for your work and also for joining us today. We really appreciate it. And this has been so fascinating. I could talk for two more hours, but I'm not going to do that to you. This has been a lot of fun. I was looking forward to having this chat. I love talking about this kind of stuff. Yeah. I am the worst dinner table guest, unless you like this topic. Tell me about it. Yeah, I am definitely with you there. We need a dinner where we're just talking about this. God, actually, maybe not. That sounds... We need a lot of wine for that dinner. All right. Well, I'm going to go ahead and play us out.

51:07As a reminder, 404 Media is journalist-founded and supported by subscribers. If you wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404media.co. You get unlimited access to articles and an ad-free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to subscribers-only sections where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope and Alyssa Midcalf. Another way to support us is by leaving a five-star rating and review for this podcast. That stuff really helps us out. This has been 4formedia. We'll see you again next week.

51:41LifeLock, how can I help? The IRS said I filed my return. But I haven't. One in four taxpaying Americans has paid the price of identity fraud. What do I do? My refund, though. I'm freaking out. Don't worry, I can fix this. LifeLock fixes identity theft guaranteed and gets your money back with up to$3 million in coverage. I'm so relieved. No problem. I'll be with you every step of the way. One in four was a fraud-paying American. Not anymore. Save up to 40 % your first year. Visit LifeLock.com slash podcast. Terms apply.