• Pornhub’s Parent Company Admits To Profiting From Sex Trafficked Victims 

    December 23, 2023
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    Internet trafficking is real and tech companies profit off these types of images and videos, and one of the largest in the online porn industry has been nabbed for their profiting off sex trafficking victims. 

    For nearly twenty years, Big Tech and Silicon Valley have known porn sells with click and baits. That is why they are in the business of porn. Many times, executives do not ask too many questions for ‘plausible deniability’  down the road if any civil or criminal legal actions are taken.

    It is a dirty world well beyond the porn industry when trafficked victims are fully exploited and posted online and the industry professes that the participants are off-age and willingly participating in the videos. 

    Game video producers and social media giants have known that sexual predators and sex traffickers use their platforms to prey upon children. 

    Traffickers have been in the porn production business at a large scale for well over 15 years as the internet has exploded. 

    Images of child rape, otherwise known as internet pedo-criminality crime scenes, and adult pornography of trafficked sex slave victims - girls, boys, women and men - is a gold rush financially for the porn industry sites and the platforms which they use.  

    This past week, one company admitted some of this in a Brooklyn courtroom, namely, Aylo Holdings S.A.R.L, the parent company of PORNHUB and other adult sites. 

    That company, Aylo Holdings S.A.R.L, acknowledged in federal court in Brooklyn on Thursday that it had profited for years from pornographic content that depicted sex trafficking victims, according to federal prosecutors.

    The parent company pleaded not guilty to a charge of engaging in unlawful monetary transactions involving sex trafficking proceeds. 

    In a parallel agreement with prosecutors, known as a deferred prosecution agreement, Aylo now is required to pay a fine of over $1.8 million. 

    The company has agreed to pay damages to women who claim they were forced to appear in porn videos that were then posted to the company’s websites without their consent.

    The terms of the agreement include that Aylo will be assigned a monitor to assess Aylo’s protocols for screening content and addressing reports of illegal content on its platforms. In return, the prosecutors will allow the charge against Aylo to be dropped after three years.

    Aylo, which was previously called MindGeek, has operated several websites that allow third parties to post and distribute adult content, according to prosecutors. 

    In 2009, Aylo began hosting pornographic videos created by the production companies GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys.

    Between 2016 and 2019, prosecutors alleged that Aylo received  messages from numerous women who said that they had been tricked into filming videos for GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys and that the videos had been published on Pornhub.com without their consent.

    Aylo was also aware of a 2017 lawsuit filed by victims of the companies, prosecutors said, and knew that a GirlsDoPorn videographer had testified that he had lied to women to persuade them to appear in the videos. 

    Nevertheless, the company continued to host the videos and profit from its partnership with the production companies, according to prosecutors.

    In 2019, several of the operators of GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys were charged in California with sex trafficking and other offenses related to “deceiving and coercing” young women to appear in pornographic videos that were then posted online without their consent.

    Aylo did not remove all of the videos from its platforms until late 2020, prosecutors claimed.

    In a statement, Aylo said it “deeply regrets” having ever hosted any content produced by GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys.

    “While the production company provided the platforms with written documentation that purported to be consent forms signed by women who were featured,” the statement said, the company now understands that those forms were obtained “through fraud and coercion.”

    Solomon Friedman, a partner at Ethical Capital Partners, the Canadian private equity firm that acquired Aylo earlier this year, emphasized that Aylo had not admitted to any illegal activity and that his company was “committed to just outcomes” for anyone wronged by GirlsDoPorn’s actions.

    “While we did not know that our partner at the time, GirlsDoPorn, was involved in unlawful activity, we later learned that they were and we regret that deeply,” he said on Thursday.

    James Smith, the assistant director in charge of the F.B.I.’s New York field office, said in a statement that Aylo was “motivated by profit” when it “enriched itself by turning a blind eye to the concerns of victims who communicated to the company that they were deceived and coerced into participating in illicit sexual activity.”

    Hundreds of people have been identified as victims of GirlsDoPorn’s sex trafficking operation, the prosecutors claim.

    The agreement with prosecutors “holds the parent company of Pornhub.com accountable for its role in hosting videos and accepting payments from criminal actors,” Breon Peace, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement. “This resolution will not only provide oversight over one of the largest online content distributors in the world and ensure the company’s lawful behavior, but it will also develop industrywide standards for safety and compliance.”

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    Author

    Christine Dolan

    Christine Dolan is a seasoned Investigative Journalist, television producer, author, and photographer. She is Co-Founder of American Conversations whose format focuses on in-depth analysis of critical issues about “the story behind the headlines.”
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    D3F1ANT

    No duh! PH is like the wild west. Too bad the FBI is busy persecuting Catholics...

    Marbran

    $1.8 million seems a quite meager sum considering the money Aylo is making from all its porn derivative sites. Slap on the wrist, sending the message, "Hide it better!"

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