Miriam Adib first learned of the photos when she returned home from a business trip. “Mom,” her daughter said. “Let me show you something.”
The 14-year-old girl opened her phone and displayed explicit photos of herself. “When you see it, you’re shocked,” said Adib, a gynecologist and mother of four daughters in the southern Spanish town of Almendralejo. “The image is completely real… If I didn’t know my daughter’s body, I would have thought that image was real.”
The deepfake is one of dozens of nude photos of schoolgirls in Almendralejo that were generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and posted on a WhatsApp group set up by other schoolchildren in the town. circulated for weeks.
Some girls whose portraits were circulated refused to go to school, suffered panic attacks, and were blackmailed and bullied in public. “My concern is that these images have reached pornographic websites that we still don’t know about today,” Adib told the Guardian at his clinic in the town.
State prosecutors are considering charges against some of the children,
Who created these images using an application downloaded from the internet. But they said they could not identify the people who developed the app and prosecutors suspected they lived somewhere in Eastern Europe.
Last year, events in Spain made global news, and in Almendralejo, a town near the Portuguese border with faded Renaissance churches and plazas, in the coming future, artificial intelligence tools will allow anyone to do so with just a few clicks Click to create ultra-realistic images.
But while deepfakes of pop stars like Taylor Swift have attracted the most attention, they are just the tip of the iceberg of non-consensus images that continue to proliferate online and that police have been largely powerless to stop.
When Adib learned of the photos, thousands of miles away at Westfield High School in New Jersey, a strikingly similar case was unfolding: Many girls were being targeted by explicit deepfake images generated by students in their class. The New Jersey incident sparked civil lawsuits and helped spur a bipartisan effort in the U.S. Congress to ban the creation and distribution of non-consensual deepfake images.
At the heart of both incidents in Spain and New Jersey is the same app, called ClothOff.
In the year since the app launched, the people running ClothOff have carefully guarded their anonymity, digitally distorting their voices to answer media questions and, in one case, using artificial intelligence to generate a completely Fake guy, they claim he is their CEO.
But a six-month investigation into a new Guardian podcast series called Black Box can reveal the names of several people who have worked for ClothOff or who our investigation shows are linked to the app.
Their trail led to Belarus and Russia but passed through European-registered businesses and front companies based in central London.
ClothOff, whose website receives more than 4 million visits per month, invites users to “use artificial intelligence to take off anyone’s clothes.” The app can be accessed via a smartphone by clicking a button confirming the user is over 18, and costs around £8.50 for 25 points.
These points are used to upload a photo of any woman or girl and get back the same undressed image.
Belarusian brother and sister
Screenshots seen by the Guardian show a Telegram account named Dasha Babicheva – social media accounts indicate she is in her 20s and lives in the Belarusian capital Minsk – conducting business on behalf of ClothOff, including discussing bank applications, websites and business collaborations Changes in partnership.
In one screenshot, an account in Babicheva’s name told colleagues at another company that if reporters had questions about ClothOff “they can contact us through this email,” and provided a press contact for the site.
An Instagram account in Babicheva’s name shared some of the same images as a Telegram account in her name and listed the same phone number. After the Guardian began asking, the account was made private. The number is also removed from the profile.
Babicheva did not answer detailed questions.
Alaiksandr Babichau, 30, identified on social media accounts as Dasha Babicheva’s brother, also appears to be close to ClothOff.
In job ads, ClothOff directs job seekers to email addresses on the AI-Imagecraft website.
Domain records for AI-Imagecraft show that the name of the website owner has been suppressed at the owner’s request.
But AI-Imagecraft has an almost identical duplicate site, A-Imagecraft, whose owner is not hidden: it is listed as Babichau. The Guardian was able to use the same username and password to log into A-Imagecraft and AI-Imagecraft, suggesting the two sites are linked.
There are further connections between Babichau and ClothOff. The Guardian has seen screenshots of conversations between ClothOff staff and potential business partners. ClothOff employees are identified only by first name, with one employee referred to as “Founder” by another employee and whose Telegram display name is “Al.”
The Guardian compared videos posted on Al’s Telegram account with publicly available videos posted on an account in the name of Alaiksandr Babichau. It shows that both Al and Babichau uploaded videos and photos of the same hotel in Macau on January 24, and uploaded videos and photos of the same hotel room in Hong Kong on January 26. This correlation suggests that the two accounts either belong to people who traveled to the city at the same time, or to the same person.
Over the phone last week, Babijo denied any connection to the deepfake app, claiming he did not have a sister named Dasha and saying the Telegram account listed in his name (which lists his phone number) does not belong to he. In response to further inquiries, he abruptly hung up the phone and did not respond to detailed questions via email.
Shortly after the conversation ended, The Guardian was blocked by a Telegram account that he claimed did not belong to him.
The road to money through London
The payments to ClothOff reveal the lengths the app’s creators went to disguise their identities. As a result of the transaction, a company called “Texture Oasis” was registered in London, which claimed to sell products for use in architectural and industrial design projects.
But the company appears to be a sham enterprise designed to conceal payments to ClothOff.
Text on the company’s website, as well as a list of employees, were copied from the website of another legitimate business. When the Guardian contacted one of the people listed as a Textured Oasis employee, he said he had never heard of the business. Our investigation found no other connections between the named employees and ClothOff, further indicating that employee lists had been copied.
The Guardian also uncovered links between ClothOff and an online video game marketplace called GGSel, which its chief executive described as a way for Russian gamers to circumvent Western sanctions.
Both websites briefly listed the same company address last year: a London-based company called GG Technology Ltd, registered to Ukrainian national Yevhen Bondarenko. Both sites have since removed any reference to the company.
Babichau’s LinkedIn account lists him as a GGSel employee.
At the same time, ClothOff’s website code was uploaded to an account in his name on the coding repository GitHub by an account named Alexander German, who is described as a web developer and whose LinkedIn says he also works at GGSel. The source code was deleted shortly after.
An individual who identified himself as Alexander German was contacted at a phone number listed on LinkedIn, and he denied being a web developer or being associated with ClothOff in any way.
After the Guardian began asking questions about the connection between GGSel and ClothOff, several LinkedIn accounts that listed their work for GGSel on their profiles removed any mention of the company, or removed their last names and photos. .
In a statement, GGSel denied any relationship with ClothOff and said it had no relationship with GG Technology Ltd, but could or did not explain why the company was listed as its owner on its website last year. The company said neither Babichau nor German is an employee and it will contact LinkedIn to ask them to remove mentions from their profiles.
Bondarenko deleted his social media accounts on Wednesday and the Guardian could not reach him for comment.
In response to questions, ClothOff said it has no affiliation with GGSel or anyone mentioned in this article. A spokesperson claimed it was not possible to use its app to “process” images of people under 18, but did not specify how or why, nor how the app generated images (including images of children) in Spain. They speculated that the New Jersey image may have been created using a competing service.
Access to the ClothOff website and app appeared to be blocked in the UK on Thursday, but was still available elsewhere.
Surveys show that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish real people from fake identities through high-quality photos, videos and even audio. A fuller account of this story will be published in an episode of Black Box released next Thursday.
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Additional reporting by Matteo Fagotto, Phil McMahon, Oliver Laughland, Manisha Ganguly, Andrew Roth, Yanina Sorokina and Kateryna Malofieieva.
