Porn site behind deepfakes with Dutch celebs, politicians has Russian and Canadian ties
The man behind Platform S. - a website featuring deepfake porn of dozens of famous Dutch people - is a Canadian “porn baron” with a past with controversial Russian businesses and a history of evading the authorities, AD reports based on research by research agency Sidenty, confirmed by other experts.
Sidenty identified the man behind Platform S. as Jack V. from Toronto, Canada. According to AD, he has been leaving a trail of destruction on the internet for years.
V. is not responsible for making the deepfake videos hosted on his platform, but he has been facilitating and distributing them since 2018. He works with companies that prefer to operate in the shadows, the newspaper wrote.
One such is DDoS-Guard, a Russian security company that is known to have worked with the terrorist movement Hamas. “They are a bodyguard for companies that are not welcome anywhere else,” cyber expert Dave Maasland said about DDoS-Guard. Platform S. had a subdomain with DDoS-Guard until last week.
According to AD, Jack V. knows how to keep his Platform S. online and out of reach of the authorities. The site works with countless servers, subservers, domains, subdomains, and IP addresses. It also operates from countries that have lax financial rules and don’t often cooperate with investigations by Western countries. Without the cooperation of the countries hosting the site’s servers, the Dutch authorities can’t take it offline. Officially, the site is registered on the Caribbean islands of Saint Kitts and Nevis.
Dozens of women in the Netherlands have pressed charges against Platform S. because of the deepfake porn videos of them on the platform. AD contacted Jack V. and confronted him with the charges. He told the newspaper that he had sold the site to a party that he “doesn’t know” and refused to answer further questions. His Facebook and Instagram profiles have been deleted, and his YouTube channel set to private after the newspaper contacted him.
According to AD, there is no evidence that V. actually sold the domain. Several cyber specialists told the newspaper that the change of ownership should be in the register.
