The legal nether world of deep fakes. On New Year's Eve twenty twenty, young women from a Long Island town were horrified to learn their photographs had been manipulated and posted online. When the law failed them, they tracked down the culprit themselves by Olivia Carville and Margie Murphy. Do you have a second? I need to call you. The text came through on Cecilia Luquy's phone around five forty five p m. On the last day of twenty twenty. She was in a shopping mall parking lot not far from her home in Levittown, a New York suburb on Long Island. She was sitting with her boyfriend and her black jeep Liberty, waiting for his shift at a movie theater to start. They were chatting about the New Year's Eve party they were hosting later that night. The message was from a former classmate at General Douglas MacArthur High School. Lucay found it odd they had graduated a year and a half earlier and hadn't talked in months. She texted back asking she could call in ten minutes after her boyfriend left for work. He's going to want to hear this too. The reply said, Lukay put the call on speaker. There's a website, the classmate said, A weird and creepy site where someone is posting explicit photos of girls from school and writing about them being raped and murdered. There's pictures of you on it, and I wanted you to know that, she said. The phone buzzed as a link to the website came through. It had an extremely graphic internet address. Come on printed picks dot com. Lukay started scrolling. She saw Anna, a classmate in her cheerleading uniform, and Ruby, a friend who'd sat beside her in detention. Then she saw a photo. She recognized it was her at eighteen, standing in a dressing room, but the swimsuit she'd been wearing in the original photo, the one she'd uploaded to social media, was gone. Someone had digitally altered the picture so it looked like she was posing completely naked. She knew the breasts weren't hers, but they looked real enough that other people might think they were. She was too stunned to speak. The next image made her gasp. It showed a print out of a photo taken when she was five, with the chubby cheeks and ringlets she'd long since grown out of. An erect penis rested atop the photo, touching her face. The accompanying post encouraged men to ejaculate on it. Then she read spit on this Spanish spic. Oh my god, lu Kay said choking. I started crying really hard, she says, nearly three years later. You know that kind of cry where you sound like you're dying, all the heavy breathing and shaking and everything. She drove back to her boyfriend's house and called the cops. An hour later, detectives from the Nassau County Police Department were knocking on the door. She hadn't been the first to call. That night, word of the website had spread across Levittown. More than forty girls from MacArthur High had been targeted. Some were working shifts and clothing stores, or sitting at home watching New Year's Eve celebrations on TV when they opened the link to see doctored nude pictures of themselves. Others were at college parties and ran home in tears. Half a world away, unbeknown to anyone in Levittown, a former police officer named Will Wallace was investigating a possible internet sex crime in New Zealand. Earlier in twenty twenty, an ex colleague had called him about a case that had stumped police. A woman was being bombarded with anonymous e mails containing pictures of herself next to erect mail Genitalia. The photos had also been sent to her parents and to a boyfriend who'd broken up with her after receiving them. The harassment had been going on for years. Wallace, who was trained to dig up evidence online and hoped to start a private investigation business, decided to look into the case, using a reverse image search tool to find places the photos had appeared online. He was directed to come on printed picks dot com. The site, which had been for about a decade, featured thousands of images. Some were rudimentary, made with basic photo editing software. Others were more sophisticated, faces stitched seamlessly onto bodies engaged in sex acts, women who'd been digitally undressed. Threads posted on the site detailed violent fantasies. Some urged Internet trolls to find and rape the women. Wallace found an account that had been sharing the photos. The man was later charged with blackmail, harassment and possession of child pornography, But to Wallace's chagrin, Come On Printed picks dot com remained in operation in the months that followed, as a group of young women on Long Island made it their mission to uncover who'd put altered images of them online. Wallace continued his investigation into the website when he found out it was charging women to remove photos. He says he was furious, who the f do they think they are to not only run a website like this, but to also charge people to remove content? Thought, and how are they getting away with this? No federal law criminalizes the creation or sharing of fake pornographic images in the US. When it comes to fake nudes of children, the law is narrow and pertains only to cases where children are being abused, and Section two thirty of the Communications Decency Act protects web forums, social media platforms, and Internet providers from being held liable for content posted on their sites. This legal landscape was problem enough for police and prosecutors when it took time and a modicum of skill to create realistic looking fake pornography, But with billions of dollars of venture capital flowing into image generating software powered by artificial intelligence, it's gotten cheaper and easier to create convincing photos and videos of things that never happened. Tools such as mid Journey and stability AI's stable Diffusion have been used to produce images of Pope Francis in a puffer jacket, actress Emma Watson as a mermaid, and former President Donald Trump sprinting from a cadre of FBI agents. The term deep fake was coined on a Reddit forum dedicated to fake porn made with deep learning models. It's now in the Oxford English Dictionary, defined as an image digitally manipulated to depict an individual doing something they didn't. More than fifteen billion such images have been created since April twenty twenty two, according to every Pixel Group, an AI photo company. The vendors that design these tools have installed safety filters to ban the creation of explicit images, but because much of the software is open source, anyone can use it, build off it, and deactivate the safeguards. Online security experts say more than ninety percent of deep fakes are pornographic in nature. Mark Pullman, founder and chief executive officer of Atios, a content moderation company, says he's seen doctored images of girls as young as three, dressed in leather, their hands tied together, their throats slit. Like many technological advances, these AI tools edged their way into popular culture before lawmakers and law enforcement authorities understood their power. One man who did is Bjorn Omer, a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and co creator of Stable Diffusion. Omer says he told academic colleagues last year, before stability Ai released the software to the public, that he was deeply concerned it had the potential for great harm and wanted researchers to stress test it first, but it was rushed out anyway, he says, to appease investors. A spokesperson for stability AI didn't respond to questions about Ohmer's allegations, but said the company is committed to preventing the misuse of AI and has taken steps to prohibit the use of its models for unlawful purposes. In October, the Biden administration issued an executive order seeking to prevent AI from producing child sexual abuse material or non consensual intimate imagery of real individuals, but its unco clear how and when such restrictions would go into effect. More than a dozen states have passed laws targeting deep fakes, but not all of them carry criminal charges. Some cover only election related content. Most states have revenge porn laws, and a few, including New York, have amended them to include deep fakes, but some prosecutors say those laws apply only to intimate photos shared consensually. As for images pulled from social media and doctored to become sexual content, no law exists. Levittown, the first Postwar U S suburb, looks much as it did in the late nineteen forties when it was built for veterans, white veterans only returning from World War II. The streets are still wide and tree lined. The single family homes are still uniform, tucked behind manicured lawns and picket fences. The fifty two thousand residents are still overwhelmingly white. Many work as teachers or cops. It's a very close knit community, lu Kay says outside her father's house. Now twenty two and an art student at a nearby community college, she goes by her middle name, Cecilia. All the houses are right next to each other, and on the inside they all look exactly the same, she says, waving to a neighbor. Walking a dog. Levittown is such a safe place to be. Nothing weird ever happens here. Kids don't get abducted, people don't get hurt or assaulted or anything like that. And that's why this was all so crazy. By New Year's Day twenty twenty one, the former MacArthur students had group threads going seeking to support one another and unmask the predator behind the harassment. They already had a suspect, Patrick Carey, a former classmate who was then nineteen. He'd never played sports or had a girlfriend, and they regarded him as a stoner with a superiority complex. His father was a police detective in New York City. Some of the young women had previously received snapchat notifications that Carrie had taken screen captures of bikini shots. They'd posted pictures that had later appeared altered on Comeonprinted picks dot com. Others recognized his handwriting from images on the site with words like whore and slut written across their faces. Luquet, who was friends with Carrie in school, saw his writing style in some of the long detailed fantasies posted along with the pictures. Several shared their suspicions with their parents and the police, who told them there wasn't much they could do. They didn't have probable cause for a warrant to subpoena Carrie's IP address. Cyber harassment cases are generally hard to prove. Keyboard predators are savvy and know how to cover their tracks. Digital evidence they may fail to mask or delete is difficult to capture and time consuming to process. The detectives hunting them are often more comfortable investigating irl or in real life crimes. Online vulgarity isn't high on police priority lists. In this case, what the person had done might be grotesque, but it wasn't obviously illegal. Months went by without an arrest. Deep fake images of Levittown girls, some made from pictures taken when they were as young as thirteen, were still being posted from accounts with names like Seri Jeinfeld and tween Hunter. The material was getting even more graphic. Some threads had reached thirty thousand views, including one where the poster asked users to send voice recordings to a girl threatening to rape her to death to finally teach her not to be such a teasing cum target. In May twenty twenty one, he wrote about her again, saying how funny it was seeing which TikTok she deletes after they get posted here. He began including the former student's full names, addresses, phone numbers, and social media handles, and prompted others to contact them directly. By summer twenty twenty one, the young women started receiving private Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat messages with their photos beside male jennis telia or covered in seamen. They got calls late at night from foreign numbers with heavy breathing at the end of the line. In response, most deleted their social media accounts. One dropped out of college. Another says she lost twenty pounds from stress. At least two started carrying knives in their handbags. The gravity of the posts did little to accelerate the police response. They told the young women they were still working on the case, but provided no further information. A spokesman for the Nassau County Police Department said detectives conducted a thorough investigation. He didn't respond to specific questions about the case. The victims and their parents cared less about the nuances of the law than the immediate danger the prime suspect was in their community. If the police weren't going to do something about it. They'd have to do something themselves. Over the summer, a former MacArthur cheerleader found a disturbing photo of herself on the site. She was smiling, wearing a white tank top and jeans. Beside that picture was what looked like a deep fake image of a woman in the same outfit, covered in blood, her hands tied behind her back and a plastic bag over her head. The caption used her real name and said her body had been found near an abandoned construction site, with seamen in her mouth, anus and vagina, and it claimed a video of her death was circulating on the dark web. I'd had enough. It had to stop, says the former student, Anna, who asked to be identified only by her first name to avoid further harassment. Anna was then working as a special needs aid at an elementary school in Levittown. She'd heard that many of her former classmates suspected one of her oldest friends was behind the pictures. She'd known Carrie since she was five. His parents modest, clabbered house backed on to East Broadway Elementary School, which they'd both attended. By the time they got to MacArthur. Anna was a cheerleader in the popular crowd, while Carrie was into grunge music and weed, but they remained friends. Sitting together in a ninth grade computer class, he'd regularly tease her about being Christian and tell her he'd rather be with the devil. Carrie liked to stir up debates on social media. He'd told some girls their viewpoints on issues like Black Lives Matter were misinformed. You don't need me to explain what a false dichotomy is, do you, he teased one. You're basically a socialist, he wrote another. I'm just trying to spare you the next five to ten years of irrational thinking. He didn't sit for a graduation photo in the twenty nineteen MacArthur yearbook. Beside his name just says camera shy. Anna new Carrie was odd, but she didn't think he was perverse enough to be behind the pictures. She decided to start her own investigation to unmask the predator and see if she could clear Carrie's name from her bedroom. She spent hours each night scrutinizing every post her harasser made. In one, he'd shared an image of his genitals bulging out of a little girl's underwear. While standing out in a girl's bedroom. Looking closely at the background, she saw a white dresser with brown trim and a stuffed toy sloth on a bed. Carrie had younger twin sisters, and Anna began searching for them on social media. She discovered that one of them was posting dancing clips on TikTok. They were filmed from the exact same bedroom she could see on comeon Printed picks dot Com in front of the same dresser with the same brown trim. Even the sloth was in the same position on the bed. Oh my god, this is crazy, Anna recalls, thinking it really is him. She says she sent the photos to Detective Timothy Ingram, the lead investigator on the case, in August twenty twenty one. You girls are doing our detective work for us, she remembers him saying that same month in New Zealand, Will Wallace was closing in on the person behind come on Printed Picks dot Com. The hunt had become an obsession. Disturbed that no one had been able to shut down this, he spent evenings when he wasn't busy with family responsibilities or online studies for a psychology degree, trying to find out who was behind it. After months of dead ends, he'd hit on the idea of sending an email to an address on the site that offered to remove photos for a fee. In his note, Wallace requested the removal of some fake nudes related to a case he was working on. He got a response asking for ninety nine dollars to take them down, and happily obliged. The invoice came from a company in California called La nerd It Consulting, but the payment went to Cloud Cyber Services LLC. Wallace learned that Cloud was registered in the UK to one Scott Trent Costa born in nineteen ninety three. The last name had appeared in some email addresses he'd previously connected to the early registration of the website. Gotcha, Wallace thought. A public record search turned up a Scott Trent Costa of the right age, residing in Louisiana. He also learned that a company that had appeared on bank statements of some victims who had requested to have their images removed, NOLA Cyber Services, was registered to Trent Costa in the same state it appeared. He'd found the man behind come on printed picks dot Com. On September fifth, twenty twenty one, according to a police report, Detective Ingram knocked on Carrie's door armed with printouts of some of the worst posts. He was home, as was his mother. Ingram started reading the posts aloud. Carrie's mother pleaded for him to stop and turned to her son, who admitted he'd written them. The report is scant on details, and Ingram didn't respond to requests for an interview, but clearly the detective heard enough. He seized Carrie's phone and tablet, placed him under arrest, and escorted him out of the house without giving him a chance to put on his shoes. At the station, Carrie gave a sworn statement saying he'd created an account on comeon printed picks dot com in his senior year when he was bored and addicted to online porn. He said he got a kick out of the way the site's users shamed girls, wrote rape fantasies about them, and shared their personal information. Carrie's case landed with Melissa Scannell, an Assistant District Attorney and chief of the Cyber Crime Division for the Nassau County District attorney's office. With the background in child sexual abuse cases, Scannell was familiar with the dark corners of the web. Working out of an office at the County Courthouse in Mineola, she began reading Carrie's posts. The tenor of what he was writing scared me. She says, I had a fear that this was going to go off the Internet. The police had filed low level harassment and obscenity charges against Carrie, which were unlikely to result in jail time for a young, first time offender, Scannell had ninety days to raise the stakes. After reviewing Carrie's posts, she walked into the office of fellow assistant District attorney Kelsey Laurer, who'd gone to MacArthur High, and said, you got to see this shit. The two got to work filing subpoenas for all the IP addresses linked to Carrie's account on comeonprinted picks dot com. They found he'd created fourteen usernames to boost his posts and make them appear more popular. In one, he'd even pretended to be a victim, begging for the harassment to stop. The prosecutors obtained warrants to gain access to Carrie's phone and apps, including ten thousand pages of Instagram direct messages. They saw evidence that he'd culled photos from social media and used software such as body Editor to digitally undress his subjects. Some were so good you wouldn't know they were fake. Scannell says. The prosecutors soon understood why police had struggled to identify appropriate charges. New York's Penal Code bans promoting a sexual performance by a child, but the image needs to depict a real incident. The images carry manipulated or defiled didn't seem to qualify, nor did the prosecutors have a path under the state's twenty nineteen revenge porn law because the photos Carrie had used had been posted public. Undeterred, they poured over the penal code and spent weeks analyzing all eleven hundred and ninety eight photos Carrie had uploaded to the site. We were getting loopy by the end, Scannal says. Then on October fifth, Laura found a real image of a fourteen year old girl's genitals that Carrie had shared on the site. The photo, taken without her consent six years before by her then boyfriend, had spread through the school via texts and social media. The district attorneys were aware of the image because the girl had complained to police about it more than a year earlier. The statute of limitations had expired for the former boyfriend, but not for Carrie, who'd shared the image in twenty twenty. I think we've got it, Laura yelled, running into Scannell's office. Two months later, Carrie was charged with multiple felonies, bringing the total number of accounts against him to thirty three. He pleaded guilty in December twenty twenty two to misdemeanor child endangerment and three felonies promoting a sexual perform torments by a child, aggravated harassment, and second degree stalking. Not one of the charges related to the eleven hundred and ninety eight non consensual pornographic deep fake images he'd created. As Carrie's case headed towards sentencing, Will Wallace's efforts to expose Scott Trent Costa and get come on printed picks dot Com taken down. We're getting nowhere. He'd tried sending the information to law enforcement officials in Louisiana and emailed reporters there with the information he'd uncovered. No one replied, He wrote a blog post laying out the details. No response. Then, in January twenty twenty three, Wallace discovered a Reddit forum where posters banned together to go after websites that host non consensual pornographic content. One target was come on Printed picks dot Com. Wallace reached out to the blogger leading it, Claudia Lopez, and she shared his investigation unmasking Trent Costa on the forum. Dozens of rolls found Trent Costa's relatives and called them. They hacked into his university email and tracked down an old mugshot for marijuana possession, and they spammed threads on comeon printed picks dot com with Trent Costa's name and photo. Every post was removed immediately. As all that was happening, Wallace and some of the vigilantes were going after the site's business model. First, they reported the site to online advertising company Exoclick, which pulled its ads. Then they turned their attention to the site's host, Russia based d dos Guard. Walla sent an email to the provider, and when he didn't get a response, he added a paragraph to its Wikipedia page. It read d doos Guard protects the fetish forum and non consensual imagery website Come On Printed Picks. The website is known for providing a platform for men to sexually degrade images of women. Within a few days, on April tenth, comeon Printed Picks dot Com was offline. D doos Guard confirmed in an email to Bloomberg Buses this week that the website is no longer using its services. It didn't say why the site went dark. Finally, Wallace told his wife, this dump has been taken down. Patrick Carey appeared for sentencing in Nassau County eight days later. He'd been staying at home since being released from police custody nineteen months earlier. Only one victim testified at the hearing, a young woman named Kayla Michelle. She asked us not to use her last name. Who'd known Carrie since she was thirteen. We were friends, she says. We hung out all the time, even after they finished school. Carrie would send her jokes on Instagram. Now twenty three in working in insurance, Kayla had been one of the first in Levittown to find out about Comeonprinted Picks dot Com. Her father, an officer with the Nassau County Police Department, had searched her name online one night in early twenty twenty and found something that disturbed him. Are you aware of this? He asked her, showing her a website on his iPhone. It had a picture of Kayla standing in her boyfriend's back yard, but the bikini she'd been wearing in the original shot had disappeared. She found pictures of herself at fifteen with braces alongside posts encouraging users to vote on which sex act they wanted to do with her, including drinking her urine. Her father tried asking his colleagues for help, but was told there wasn't much they could do. The photos were fake and the poster was anonymous. Thinking she'd been the only girl targeted, Kayla didn't tell any of her friends. She didn't hear anything more about the sight until that New Year's Eve, when word got out. She attended every one of Carrie's hearings leading up to the sentencing, her dyed, bright orange hair and nose piercing standing out in court. At one session, the father of a victim had to be restrained after trying to jump the barrier to attack Carrie. At another, Carrie's father abruptly left the court room, visibly distressed when some of his son's more graphic posts were read aloud. Cala says that after discovering the fake photos, I'd lived with a fear of being by myself, fear of going outside, fear of men in general. She'd had nightmares in which strange men hunted her or she had raped me tattooed on her forehead, just as she'd seen on the website. I didn't want to live my life and fear for what he took away from me. She stepped into the witness box with her handwritten statement. Her hands were shaking so much the paper was barely legible to her. She took three deep breaths and looked at Carrie, who didn't return her gaze. This is for all of the victims, she began. I am looking you directly in the face to tell you that you disgusted me. You had the audacity to talk to me through social media, joke with me, and try to be cordial with me while behind my back belittling me, putting me down, sexualizing my younger self and body. You completely changed the way that I viewed myself and my body, and for that I'll never give you I hear your name and I feel sick. Carrie was sentenced to six months in prison, ten years probation, and lifetime status as a sex offender, which meant he'd no longer be able to own a smartphone or any device with a camera, or be within one thousand feet of a school or a playground. In a press conference after the sentencing, Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly said the depravity on display in the case truly makes my skin crawl. But Carrie had underestimated the bravery of the young women he'd targeted, she said, and that is why we are able to stand here today and make this announcement. Then, Donnelly unveiled a proposal to make deep fakes illegal in New York. The Digital Manipulation Protection Act, she said, would make it a criminal offense to publish sexually explicit photos that had been digitally altered, whether the images were originally shared on social media or not. A version of the bill has been introduced in the state Assembly and is looking for sponsors in the Senate. With Kerrie behind the Nassau County prosecutors had one final task. Scannell and Laurer drafted a letter to send to comeon printed picks dot com, providing Carrie's certificate of conviction and an outline of the case based on his criminal conviction arising out of his posts. They wrote, we would respectfully request that you remove all posts by usernames associated with him. But when they went to the website to search for the administrator's email in April, they discovered the site was gone. They didn't know that an ex cop in New Zealand had seen that it was taken down. That should have been the end of it, except it wasn't. When BusinessWeek, drawing on publicity records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, searched for usernames Carrie had employed on comeon printed picks dot com, the names also turned up at the url tribute printed picks dot com. It was the same website with a different address. What Scannell said in August when told about Tribute printed picks dot com it's back. She tried to open it on her work phone but was blocked by a firewall. She texted a colleague, a cybercrime analyst with unrestricted web access, and asked her to see if the deep fakes of the former MacArthur's students were still visible. Minutes later, the analyst texted back in all caps what the actual f Later that day, Scannell and Laurer sent their letter to the administrator of Tribute Printed picks dot Com. Most of the MacArthur class of twenty nineteen deep fakes have since been removed from the site, but thousands of other images remain, including some showing teenagers with seamen running down their faces or participating in group sex. Some users on the site offer stable diffusion deep fakes for sale, while others post pictures of women taken from social media and ask who can fake them. BusinessWeek's efforts to track down Scott Trencosta at la nerd It Consulting's office in Monterey Park, California, were fruitless. A person at the address said no one from the company had been around in years, and mail addressed to Trent Costa had been piling up. An e mail sent to him in November informing him that BusinessWeek intended to identify him in connection with comeon Printed picks dot Com elicited a plea not to name and shame, and an explanation that people who don't want to have their pictures posted can have them removed for free. The sender signed off by calling the reporter weirdo. As for Wallace, he's put his hunt for Trent Costa on hold. He's now working as a health and safety inspector on a construction site in Queenstown in southern New Zealand. The young women in Levittown are trying to move on, but it's hard. Fourteen of them have protection orders out against Carrie until twenty thirty one. They still can't grasp how what he did to their photos is legal. As for Carrie, he was released from prison in September after four months with time off for good behavior, and is back home. He and his father declined to comment for this story. In early November, Cecilia Luquet was driving through Levittown when she saw Carrie wandering down the street. He was wearing a brown hoodie and had headphones on. She recognized his walk. My heart started racing and I started crying, says Luquat. She turned her car around to confront him, but by the time she got back to the spot, he disappeared.

The legal nether world of deep fakes. On New Year's Eve twenty twenty, young women from a Long Island town were horrified to learn their photographs had been manipulated and posted online. When the law failed them, they tracked down the culprit themselves by Olivia Carville and Margie Murphy. Do you have a second? I need to call you. The text came through on Cecilia Luquy's phone around five forty five p m. On the last day of twenty twenty. She was in a shopping mall parking lot not far from her home in Levittown, a New York suburb on Long Island. She was sitting with her boyfriend and her black jeep Liberty, waiting for his shift at a movie theater to start. They were chatting about the New Year's Eve party they were hosting later that night. The message was from a former classmate at General Douglas MacArthur High School. Lucay found it odd they had graduated a year and a half earlier and hadn't talked in months. She texted back asking she could call in ten minutes after her boyfriend left for work. He's going to want to hear this too. The reply said, Lukay put the call on speaker. There's a website, the classmate said, A weird and creepy site where someone is posting explicit photos of girls from school and writing about them being raped and murdered. There's pictures of you on it, and I wanted you to know that, she said. The phone buzzed as a link to the website came through. It had an extremely graphic internet address. Come on printed picks dot com. Lukay started scrolling. She saw Anna, a classmate in her cheerleading uniform, and Ruby, a friend who'd sat beside her in detention. Then she saw a photo. She recognized it was her at eighteen, standing in a dressing room, but the swimsuit she'd been wearing in the original photo, the one she'd uploaded to social media, was gone. Someone had digitally altered the picture so it looked like she was posing completely naked. She knew the breasts weren't hers, but they looked real enough that other people might think they were. She was too stunned to speak. The next image made her gasp. It showed a print out of a photo taken when she was five, with the chubby cheeks and ringlets she'd long since grown out of. An erect penis rested atop the photo, touching her face. The accompanying post encouraged men to ejaculate on it. Then she read spit on this Spanish spic. Oh my god, lu Kay said choking. I started crying really hard, she says, nearly three years later. You know that kind of cry where you sound like you're dying, all the heavy breathing and shaking and everything. She drove back to her boyfriend's house and called the cops. An hour later, detectives from the Nassau County Police Department were knocking on the door. She hadn't been the first to call. That night, word of the website had spread across Levittown. More than forty girls from MacArthur High had been targeted. Some were working shifts and clothing stores, or sitting at home watching New Year's Eve celebrations on TV when they opened the link to see doctored nude pictures of themselves. Others were at college parties and ran home in tears. Half a world away, unbeknown to anyone in Levittown, a former police officer named Will Wallace was investigating a possible internet sex crime in New Zealand. Earlier in twenty twenty, an ex colleague had called him about a case that had stumped police. A woman was being bombarded with anonymous e mails containing pictures of herself next to erect mail Genitalia. The photos had also been sent to her parents and to a boyfriend who'd broken up with her after receiving them. The harassment had been going on for years. Wallace, who was trained to dig up evidence online and hoped to start a private investigation business, decided to look into the case, using a reverse image search tool to find places the photos had appeared online. He was directed to come on printed picks dot com. The site, which had been for about a decade, featured thousands of images. Some were rudimentary, made with basic photo editing software. Others were more sophisticated, faces stitched seamlessly onto bodies engaged in sex acts, women who'd been digitally undressed. Threads posted on the site detailed violent fantasies. Some urged Internet trolls to find and rape the women. Wallace found an account that had been sharing the photos. The man was later charged with blackmail, harassment and possession of child pornography, But to Wallace's chagrin, Come On Printed picks dot com remained in operation in the months that followed, as a group of young women on Long Island made it their mission to uncover who'd put altered images of them online. Wallace continued his investigation into the website when he found out it was charging women to remove photos. He says he was furious, who the f do they think they are to not only run a website like this, but to also charge people to remove content? Thought, and how are they getting away with this? No federal law criminalizes the creation or sharing of fake pornographic images in the US. When it comes to fake nudes of children, the law is narrow and pertains only to cases where children are being abused, and Section two thirty of the Communications Decency Act protects web forums, social media platforms, and Internet providers from being held liable for content posted on their sites. This legal landscape was problem enough for police and prosecutors when it took time and a modicum of skill to create realistic looking fake pornography, But with billions of dollars of venture capital flowing into image generating software powered by artificial intelligence, it's gotten cheaper and easier to create convincing photos and videos of things that never happened. Tools such as mid Journey and stability AI's stable Diffusion have been used to produce images of Pope Francis in a puffer jacket, actress Emma Watson as a mermaid, and former President Donald Trump sprinting from a cadre of FBI agents. The term deep fake was coined on a Reddit forum dedicated to fake porn made with deep learning models. It's now in the Oxford English Dictionary, defined as an image digitally manipulated to depict an individual doing something they didn't. More than fifteen billion such images have been created since April twenty twenty two, according to every Pixel Group, an AI photo company. The vendors that design these tools have installed safety filters to ban the creation of explicit images, but because much of the software is open source, anyone can use it, build off it, and deactivate the safeguards. Online security experts say more than ninety percent of deep fakes are pornographic in nature. Mark Pullman, founder and chief executive officer of Atios, a content moderation company, says he's seen doctored images of girls as young as three, dressed in leather, their hands tied together, their throats slit. Like many technological advances, these AI tools edged their way into popular culture before lawmakers and law enforcement authorities understood their power. One man who did is Bjorn Omer, a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and co creator of Stable Diffusion. Omer says he told academic colleagues last year, before stability Ai released the software to the public, that he was deeply concerned it had the potential for great harm and wanted researchers to stress test it first, but it was rushed out anyway, he says, to appease investors. A spokesperson for stability AI didn't respond to questions about Ohmer's allegations, but said the company is committed to preventing the misuse of AI and has taken steps to prohibit the use of its models for unlawful purposes. In October, the Biden administration issued an executive order seeking to prevent AI from producing child sexual abuse material or non consensual intimate imagery of real individuals, but its unco clear how and when such restrictions would go into effect. More than a dozen states have passed laws targeting deep fakes, but not all of them carry criminal charges. Some cover only election related content. Most states have revenge porn laws, and a few, including New York, have amended them to include deep fakes, but some prosecutors say those laws apply only to intimate photos shared consensually. As for images pulled from social media and doctored to become sexual content, no law exists. Levittown, the first Postwar U S suburb, looks much as it did in the late nineteen forties when it was built for veterans, white veterans only returning from World War II. The streets are still wide and tree lined. The single family homes are still uniform, tucked behind manicured lawns and picket fences. The fifty two thousand residents are still overwhelmingly white. Many work as teachers or cops. It's a very close knit community, lu Kay says outside her father's house. Now twenty two and an art student at a nearby community college, she goes by her middle name, Cecilia. All the houses are right next to each other, and on the inside they all look exactly the same, she says, waving to a neighbor. Walking a dog. Levittown is such a safe place to be. Nothing weird ever happens here. Kids don't get abducted, people don't get hurt or assaulted or anything like that. And that's why this was all so crazy. By New Year's Day twenty twenty one, the former MacArthur students had group threads going seeking to support one another and unmask the predator behind the harassment. They already had a suspect, Patrick Carey, a former classmate who was then nineteen. He'd never played sports or had a girlfriend, and they regarded him as a stoner with a superiority complex. His father was a police detective in New York City. Some of the young women had previously received snapchat notifications that Carrie had taken screen captures of bikini shots. They'd posted pictures that had later appeared altered on Comeonprinted picks dot com. Others recognized his handwriting from images on the site with words like whore and slut written across their faces. Luquet, who was friends with Carrie in school, saw his writing style in some of the long detailed fantasies posted along with the pictures. Several shared their suspicions with their parents and the police, who told them there wasn't much they could do. They didn't have probable cause for a warrant to subpoena Carrie's IP address. Cyber harassment cases are generally hard to prove. Keyboard predators are savvy and know how to cover their tracks. Digital evidence they may fail to mask or delete is difficult to capture and time consuming to process. The detectives hunting them are often more comfortable investigating irl or in real life crimes. Online vulgarity isn't high on police priority lists. In this case, what the person had done might be grotesque, but it wasn't obviously illegal. Months went by without an arrest. Deep fake images of Levittown girls, some made from pictures taken when they were as young as thirteen, were still being posted from accounts with names like Seri Jeinfeld and tween Hunter. The material was getting even more graphic. Some threads had reached thirty thousand views, including one where the poster asked users to send voice recordings to a girl threatening to rape her to death to finally teach her not to be such a teasing cum target. In May twenty twenty one, he wrote about her again, saying how funny it was seeing which TikTok she deletes after they get posted here. He began including the former student's full names, addresses, phone numbers, and social media handles, and prompted others to contact them directly. By summer twenty twenty one, the young women started receiving private Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat messages with their photos beside male jennis telia or covered in seamen. They got calls late at night from foreign numbers with heavy breathing at the end of the line. In response, most deleted their social media accounts. One dropped out of college. Another says she lost twenty pounds from stress. At least two started carrying knives in their handbags. The gravity of the posts did little to accelerate the police response. They told the young women they were still working on the case, but provided no further information. A spokesman for the Nassau County Police Department said detectives conducted a thorough investigation. He didn't respond to specific questions about the case. The victims and their parents cared less about the nuances of the law than the immediate danger the prime suspect was in their community. If the police weren't going to do something about it. They'd have to do something themselves. Over the summer, a former MacArthur cheerleader found a disturbing photo of herself on the site. She was smiling, wearing a white tank top and jeans. Beside that picture was what looked like a deep fake image of a woman in the same outfit, covered in blood, her hands tied behind her back and a plastic bag over her head. The caption used her real name and said her body had been found near an abandoned construction site, with seamen in her mouth, anus and vagina, and it claimed a video of her death was circulating on the dark web. I'd had enough. It had to stop, says the former student, Anna, who asked to be identified only by her first name to avoid further harassment. Anna was then working as a special needs aid at an elementary school in Levittown. She'd heard that many of her former classmates suspected one of her oldest friends was behind the pictures. She'd known Carrie since she was five. His parents modest, clabbered house backed on to East Broadway Elementary School, which they'd both attended. By the time they got to MacArthur. Anna was a cheerleader in the popular crowd, while Carrie was into grunge music and weed, but they remained friends. Sitting together in a ninth grade computer class, he'd regularly tease her about being Christian and tell her he'd rather be with the devil. Carrie liked to stir up debates on social media. He'd told some girls their viewpoints on issues like Black Lives Matter were misinformed. You don't need me to explain what a false dichotomy is, do you, he teased one. You're basically a socialist, he wrote another. I'm just trying to spare you the next five to ten years of irrational thinking. He didn't sit for a graduation photo in the twenty nineteen MacArthur yearbook. Beside his name just says camera shy. Anna new Carrie was odd, but she didn't think he was perverse enough to be behind the pictures. She decided to start her own investigation to unmask the predator and see if she could clear Carrie's name from her bedroom. She spent hours each night scrutinizing every post her harasser made. In one, he'd shared an image of his genitals bulging out of a little girl's underwear. While standing out in a girl's bedroom. Looking closely at the background, she saw a white dresser with brown trim and a stuffed toy sloth on a bed. Carrie had younger twin sisters, and Anna began searching for them on social media. She discovered that one of them was posting dancing clips on TikTok. They were filmed from the exact same bedroom she could see on comeon Printed picks dot Com in front of the same dresser with the same brown trim. Even the sloth was in the same position on the bed. Oh my god, this is crazy, Anna recalls, thinking it really is him. She says she sent the photos to Detective Timothy Ingram, the lead investigator on the case, in August twenty twenty one. You girls are doing our detective work for us, she remembers him saying that same month in New Zealand, Will Wallace was closing in on the person behind come on Printed Picks dot Com. The hunt had become an obsession. Disturbed that no one had been able to shut down this, he spent evenings when he wasn't busy with family responsibilities or online studies for a psychology degree, trying to find out who was behind it. After months of dead ends, he'd hit on the idea of sending an email to an address on the site that offered to remove photos for a fee. In his note, Wallace requested the removal of some fake nudes related to a case he was working on. He got a response asking for ninety nine dollars to take them down, and happily obliged. The invoice came from a company in California called La nerd It Consulting, but the payment went to Cloud Cyber Services LLC. Wallace learned that Cloud was registered in the UK to one Scott Trent Costa born in nineteen ninety three. The last name had appeared in some email addresses he'd previously connected to the early registration of the website. Gotcha, Wallace thought. A public record search turned up a Scott Trent Costa of the right age, residing in Louisiana. He also learned that a company that had appeared on bank statements of some victims who had requested to have their images removed, NOLA Cyber Services, was registered to Trent Costa in the same state it appeared. He'd found the man behind come on printed picks dot Com. On September fifth, twenty twenty one, according to a police report, Detective Ingram knocked on Carrie's door armed with printouts of some of the worst posts. He was home, as was his mother. Ingram started reading the posts aloud. Carrie's mother pleaded for him to stop and turned to her son, who admitted he'd written them. The report is scant on details, and Ingram didn't respond to requests for an interview, but clearly the detective heard enough. He seized Carrie's phone and tablet, placed him under arrest, and escorted him out of the house without giving him a chance to put on his shoes. At the station, Carrie gave a sworn statement saying he'd created an account on comeon printed picks dot com in his senior year when he was bored and addicted to online porn. He said he got a kick out of the way the site's users shamed girls, wrote rape fantasies about them, and shared their personal information. Carrie's case landed with Melissa Scannell, an Assistant District Attorney and chief of the Cyber Crime Division for the Nassau County District attorney's office. With the background in child sexual abuse cases, Scannell was familiar with the dark corners of the web. Working out of an office at the County Courthouse in Mineola, she began reading Carrie's posts. The tenor of what he was writing scared me. She says, I had a fear that this was going to go off the Internet. The police had filed low level harassment and obscenity charges against Carrie, which were unlikely to result in jail time for a young, first time offender, Scannell had ninety days to raise the stakes. After reviewing Carrie's posts, she walked into the office of fellow assistant District attorney Kelsey Laurer, who'd gone to MacArthur High, and said, you got to see this shit. The two got to work filing subpoenas for all the IP addresses linked to Carrie's account on comeonprinted picks dot com. They found he'd created fourteen usernames to boost his posts and make them appear more popular. In one, he'd even pretended to be a victim, begging for the harassment to stop. The prosecutors obtained warrants to gain access to Carrie's phone and apps, including ten thousand pages of Instagram direct messages. They saw evidence that he'd culled photos from social media and used software such as body Editor to digitally undress his subjects. Some were so good you wouldn't know they were fake. Scannell says. The prosecutors soon understood why police had struggled to identify appropriate charges. New York's Penal Code bans promoting a sexual performance by a child, but the image needs to depict a real incident. The images carry manipulated or defiled didn't seem to qualify, nor did the prosecutors have a path under the state's twenty nineteen revenge porn law because the photos Carrie had used had been posted public. Undeterred, they poured over the penal code and spent weeks analyzing all eleven hundred and ninety eight photos Carrie had uploaded to the site. We were getting loopy by the end, Scannal says. Then on October fifth, Laura found a real image of a fourteen year old girl's genitals that Carrie had shared on the site. The photo, taken without her consent six years before by her then boyfriend, had spread through the school via texts and social media. The district attorneys were aware of the image because the girl had complained to police about it more than a year earlier. The statute of limitations had expired for the former boyfriend, but not for Carrie, who'd shared the image in twenty twenty. I think we've got it, Laura yelled, running into Scannell's office. Two months later, Carrie was charged with multiple felonies, bringing the total number of accounts against him to thirty three. He pleaded guilty in December twenty twenty two to misdemeanor child endangerment and three felonies promoting a sexual perform torments by a child, aggravated harassment, and second degree stalking. Not one of the charges related to the eleven hundred and ninety eight non consensual pornographic deep fake images he'd created. As Carrie's case headed towards sentencing, Will Wallace's efforts to expose Scott Trent Costa and get come on printed picks dot Com taken down. We're getting nowhere. He'd tried sending the information to law enforcement officials in Louisiana and emailed reporters there with the information he'd uncovered. No one replied, He wrote a blog post laying out the details. No response. Then, in January twenty twenty three, Wallace discovered a Reddit forum where posters banned together to go after websites that host non consensual pornographic content. One target was come on Printed picks dot Com. Wallace reached out to the blogger leading it, Claudia Lopez, and she shared his investigation unmasking Trent Costa on the forum. Dozens of rolls found Trent Costa's relatives and called them. They hacked into his university email and tracked down an old mugshot for marijuana possession, and they spammed threads on comeon printed picks dot com with Trent Costa's name and photo. Every post was removed immediately. As all that was happening, Wallace and some of the vigilantes were going after the site's business model. First, they reported the site to online advertising company Exoclick, which pulled its ads. Then they turned their attention to the site's host, Russia based d dos Guard. Walla sent an email to the provider, and when he didn't get a response, he added a paragraph to its Wikipedia page. It read d doos Guard protects the fetish forum and non consensual imagery website Come On Printed Picks. The website is known for providing a platform for men to sexually degrade images of women. Within a few days, on April tenth, comeon Printed Picks dot Com was offline. D doos Guard confirmed in an email to Bloomberg Buses this week that the website is no longer using its services. It didn't say why the site went dark. Finally, Wallace told his wife, this dump has been taken down. Patrick Carey appeared for sentencing in Nassau County eight days later. He'd been staying at home since being released from police custody nineteen months earlier. Only one victim testified at the hearing, a young woman named Kayla Michelle. She asked us not to use her last name. Who'd known Carrie since she was thirteen. We were friends, she says. We hung out all the time, even after they finished school. Carrie would send her jokes on Instagram. Now twenty three in working in insurance, Kayla had been one of the first in Levittown to find out about Comeonprinted Picks dot Com. Her father, an officer with the Nassau County Police Department, had searched her name online one night in early twenty twenty and found something that disturbed him. Are you aware of this? He asked her, showing her a website on his iPhone. It had a picture of Kayla standing in her boyfriend's back yard, but the bikini she'd been wearing in the original shot had disappeared. She found pictures of herself at fifteen with braces alongside posts encouraging users to vote on which sex act they wanted to do with her, including drinking her urine. Her father tried asking his colleagues for help, but was told there wasn't much they could do. The photos were fake and the poster was anonymous. Thinking she'd been the only girl targeted, Kayla didn't tell any of her friends. She didn't hear anything more about the sight until that New Year's Eve, when word got out. She attended every one of Carrie's hearings leading up to the sentencing, her dyed, bright orange hair and nose piercing standing out in court. At one session, the father of a victim had to be restrained after trying to jump the barrier to attack Carrie. At another, Carrie's father abruptly left the court room, visibly distressed when some of his son's more graphic posts were read aloud. Cala says that after discovering the fake photos, I'd lived with a fear of being by myself, fear of going outside, fear of men in general. She'd had nightmares in which strange men hunted her or she had raped me tattooed on her forehead, just as she'd seen on the website. I didn't want to live my life and fear for what he took away from me. She stepped into the witness box with her handwritten statement. Her hands were shaking so much the paper was barely legible to her. She took three deep breaths and looked at Carrie, who didn't return her gaze. This is for all of the victims, she began. I am looking you directly in the face to tell you that you disgusted me. You had the audacity to talk to me through social media, joke with me, and try to be cordial with me while behind my back belittling me, putting me down, sexualizing my younger self and body. You completely changed the way that I viewed myself and my body, and for that I'll never give you I hear your name and I feel sick. Carrie was sentenced to six months in prison, ten years probation, and lifetime status as a sex offender, which meant he'd no longer be able to own a smartphone or any device with a camera, or be within one thousand feet of a school or a playground. In a press conference after the sentencing, Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly said the depravity on display in the case truly makes my skin crawl. But Carrie had underestimated the bravery of the young women he'd targeted, she said, and that is why we are able to stand here today and make this announcement. Then, Donnelly unveiled a proposal to make deep fakes illegal in New York. The Digital Manipulation Protection Act, she said, would make it a criminal offense to publish sexually explicit photos that had been digitally altered, whether the images were originally shared on social media or not. A version of the bill has been introduced in the state Assembly and is looking for sponsors in the Senate. With Kerrie behind the Nassau County prosecutors had one final task. Scannell and Laurer drafted a letter to send to comeon printed picks dot com, providing Carrie's certificate of conviction and an outline of the case based on his criminal conviction arising out of his posts. They wrote, we would respectfully request that you remove all posts by usernames associated with him. But when they went to the website to search for the administrator's email in April, they discovered the site was gone. They didn't know that an ex cop in New Zealand had seen that it was taken down. That should have been the end of it, except it wasn't. When BusinessWeek, drawing on publicity records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, searched for usernames Carrie had employed on comeon printed picks dot com, the names also turned up at the url tribute printed picks dot com. It was the same website with a different address. What Scannell said in August when told about Tribute printed picks dot com it's back. She tried to open it on her work phone but was blocked by a firewall. She texted a colleague, a cybercrime analyst with unrestricted web access, and asked her to see if the deep fakes of the former MacArthur's students were still visible. Minutes later, the analyst texted back in all caps what the actual f Later that day, Scannell and Laurer sent their letter to the administrator of Tribute Printed picks dot Com. Most of the MacArthur class of twenty nineteen deep fakes have since been removed from the site, but thousands of other images remain, including some showing teenagers with seamen running down their faces or participating in group sex. Some users on the site offer stable diffusion deep fakes for sale, while others post pictures of women taken from social media and ask who can fake them. BusinessWeek's efforts to track down Scott Trencosta at la nerd It Consulting's office in Monterey Park, California, were fruitless. A person at the address said no one from the company had been around in years, and mail addressed to Trent Costa had been piling up. An e mail sent to him in November informing him that BusinessWeek intended to identify him in connection with comeon Printed picks dot Com elicited a plea not to name and shame, and an explanation that people who don't want to have their pictures posted can have them removed for free. The sender signed off by calling the reporter weirdo. As for Wallace, he's put his hunt for Trent Costa on hold. He's now working as a health and safety inspector on a construction site in Queenstown in southern New Zealand. The young women in Levittown are trying to move on, but it's hard. Fourteen of them have protection orders out against Carrie until twenty thirty one. They still can't grasp how what he did to their photos is legal. As for Carrie, he was released from prison in September after four months with time off for good behavior, and is back home. He and his father declined to comment for this story. In early November, Cecilia Luquet was driving through Levittown when she saw Carrie wandering down the street. He was wearing a brown hoodie and had headphones on. She recognized his walk. My heart started racing and I started crying, says Luquat. She turned her car around to confront him, but by the time she got back to the spot, he disappeared.