On Wednesday morning, Motherboard published an investigation into the world of porn thieves who steal adult content in bulk from subscription sites like OnlyFans.
As part of that reporting, Motherboard uncovered multiple servers on the chat platform Discord, where people were trading and selling databases of stolen videos and images from creators, as well as sharing tools to continue scraping more content.
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By Wednesday afternoon, after the publication of this piece, Discord removed multiple servers and banned the owners of each, a Discord spokesperson told Motherboard in an email.
“Discord prohibits the sale, dissemination, and promotion of cracked accounts,” a spokesperson told Motherboard. “We ban users and shut down servers that are responsible for this behavior. In cases of copyrighted material, we respond promptly to DMCA takedown requests and take the appropriate action.”
The bans are permanent, and the owners can no longer access their accounts for any purpose. Former members of those servers can no longer access those servers, either.
During Motherboard’s reporting, Google removed an OnlyFans scraping Chrome extension when approached for comment.
Stolen content is a problem that has plagued the adult industry for as long as porn has existed on the internet. Several owners of premium platforms similar to OnlyFans urged the industry to do better in how it safeguards content, by protecting models from theft using more advanced fingerprinting, watermarking, copyright takedown support, and technology that could prevent scrapers from using these tools to begin with.
One of the biggest mainstream platforms where stolen content was shared taking a stand against stolen porn is a step in the right direction to preventing theft from happening to others.
