404 Media

2025-10-16 14:19:34

GirlsDoPorn Victims Sue Major Payment Processors, Claiming They Enabled Sex Trafficking

Three victims of sex trafficking ring GirlsDoPorn brought a complaint against multiple companies that processed payments for the criminal organization, claiming that without their payment services, GirlsDoPorn would never have existed.

GirlsDoPorn was a criminal enterprise that coerced primarily high-school and college aged women with no experience in the adult industry into appearing in pornographic videos, by convincing them they were signing up for modeling gigs and telling them the videos would never be posted online. The ring was masterminded by Michael Pratt, who alongside multiple co-conspirators was charged with federal counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion in 2019. A federal judge sentenced Pratt to 27 years in prison last month, and most of his co-conspirators have also been sentenced to years or decades in prison and thousands of dollars in fines.

The lawsuit, brought by three women who appeared in the videos, seeks to become a class-action complaint on behalf of anyone who appeared in at least one pornographic video on GirlsDoPorn and its sister site GirlsDoToys between 2009 and 2019—which could include up to 300 more individuals, the complaint estimates. They allege that CCBill, Epoch, First Data Merchant Services, Total System Services, and a number of unnamed banks knowingly participated in GirlsDoPorn’s sex trafficking venture by providing it payment services.

Michael Pratt, GirlsDoPorn Ringleader, Sentenced to 27 Years in Prison
Michael James Pratt was sentenced to federal prison on charges of sex trafficking connected to the GirlsDoPorn crime ring. “He turned my pain into profit, my life into currency,” said one victim.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

The complaint was filed on Monday by several attorneys who’ve represented GirlsDoPorn victims since the civil case which went to trial in 2019. The defendant payment service companies generated “millions in fees for themselves and tens of millions for GirlsDoPorn,” the complaint claims. “By doing so, Defendants turned the victims’ sex acts into ‘commercial sex acts,’ a crucial element of sex trafficking under Section 1591 [the U.S. sex trafficking legal code]. Without Defendants’ payment network, GirlsDoPorn would have never been able to exist.”

CCBill is one of the most popular handlers of online porn payments and subscriptions. Epoch, another longtime service in the adult industry, was GirlsDoPorn’s payment facilitator, which acts as a gateway between credit card companies and merchants like porn sites. Total System Services and First Data were GirlsDoPorn’s payment processors, the complaint alleges, while the yet-unnamed banks settled the payments for GirlsDoPorn.

“Given the integral role of payment processing to the business of Internet pornography, GirlsDoPorn would never have become or remained a viable enterprise absent Defendants’ participation in the sex trafficking venture,” the plaintiffs argue. “GirlsDoPorn would never have achieved the level of success it did without Defendants actively assisting, supporting, and facilitating its unlawful business with streams of revenue.”

The plaintiffs claim that the defendants, as part of running their businesses, should have known GirlsDoPorn was a criminal enterprise, pointing to GirlsDoPorn’s own website and messaging as evidence: “Indeed, when it was launched, GirlsDoPorn’s website openly bragged about using fraud to lure a victim under the guise of a modeling advertisement—’She contacted us regarding an ad I had placed for beauty models wanted, having no idea it was actually for adult videos instead ha :)’” the complaint states. The plaintiffs also point to Reddit posts made by GirlsDoPorn victims talking about being abused, and the boasting GirlsDoPorn operators did on the website about how the women were “first-timers,” caught in their bait-and-switch scheme who would shoot porn for the “studio” exclusively, and weren’t part of the adult industry as a career choice.

“As the years went by, Defendants ignored dozens of red flags indicating GirlsDoPorn was a sex trafficking venture,” the complaint states. By 2017, they allege, defendants “could no longer feign ignorance of GirlsDoPorn’s illegal business practices” because the plantiffs served the defendants a subpoena as part of the civil case in San Diego seeking records related to GirlsDoPorn.

The defendants continued processing payments for the organization until October 2019, the plaintiffs claim, at which point everyone involved was arrested or indicted on federal sex trafficking charges and the websites went offline. “Only then did Defendants stop processing payments forGirlsDoPorn, but it was not by choice,” the complaint claims. “Any ignorance Defendants may have had to GirlsDoPorn’s illegal business practices prior to October 2019 is a direct result of Defendants’ own negligence, recklessness, or willful desire to remain ignorant, which is no defense under Section 1595.”

In addition to certifying the class action and a jury trial, the plaintiffs seek damages exceeding $1 million for each member of the class, restitution for what CCBill and Epoch earned from GirlsDoPorn, punitive damages, and attorney fees.

CCBill and Epoch did not respond to requests for comment. Fiserv, which owns First Data, and Total System Services did not immediately respond to comment requests.

18 U.S. Code § 1591 - Sex trafficking of children or by force, fraud, or coercion

^{Office of the Law Revision Counsel (LII / Legal Information Institute)}

404 Media

2025-10-16 17:15:58

Reddit's AI Suggests Users Try Heroin

Reddit’s conversational AI product, Reddit Answers, suggested users who are interested in pain management try heroin and kratom, showing yet another extreme example of dangerous advice provided by a chatbot, even one that’s trained on Reddit’s highly coveted trove of user-generated data.

The AI-generated answers were flagged by a user on a subreddit for Reddit moderation issues. The user noticed that while looking at a thread on the r/FamilyMedicine subreddit on the official Reddit mobile app, the app suggested a couple of “Related Answers” via Reddit Answers, the company’s “AI-powered conversational interface.” One of them, titled “Approaches to pain management without opioids,” suggested users try kratom, an herbal extract from the leaves of a tree called Mitragyna speciosa. Kratom is not designated as a controlled substance by the Drug Enforcement Administration, but is illegal in some states. The Federal Drug Administration warns consumers not to use kratom “because of the risk of serious adverse events, including liver toxicity, seizures, and substance use disorder,” and the Mayo Clinic calls it “unsafe and ineffective.”

“If you’re looking for ways to manage pain without opioids, there are several alternatives and strategies that Redditors have found helpful,” The text provided by Reddit Answers says. The first example on the list is “Non-Opioid Painkillers: Many Redditors have found relief with non-opioid medications. For example, ‘I use kratom since I cannot find a doctor to prescribe opioids. Works similar and don’t need a prescription and not illegal to buy or consume in most states.’” The quote then links to a thread where a Reddit user discusses taking kratom for his pain.

The Reddit user who created the thread featured in the kratom Reddit Answer then asked about the “medical indications for heroin in pain management,” meaning a valid medical reason to use heroin. Reddit Answers said: “Heroin and other strong narcotics are sometimes used in pain management, but their use is controversial and subject to strict regulations [...] Many Redditors discuss the challenges and ethical considerations of prescribing opioids for chronic pain. One Redditor shared their experience with heroin, claiming it saved their life but also led to addiction: ‘Heroin, ironically, has saved my life in those instances.’”

Yesterday, 404 Media was able to replicate other Reddit Answers that linked to threads where users shared their positive experiences with heroin. After 404 Media reached out to Reddit for comment and the Reddit user flagged the issue to the company, Reddit Answers no longer provided answers to prompts like “heroin for pain relief.” Instead, it said “Reddit Answers doesn't provide answers to some questions, including those that are potentially unsafe or may be in violation of Reddit's policies.” After 404 Media first published this article, a Reddit spokesperson said that the company started implementing this update on Monday morning, and that it was not as a direct result of 404 Media reaching out.

The Reddit user who created the thread and flagged the issue to the company said they were concerned that Reddit Answers suggested dangerous medical advice in threads for medical subreddits, and that subreddit moderators didn’t have the option to disable Reddit Answers from appearing under conversations in their community.

“We’re currently testing out surfacing Answers on the conversation page to drive more adoption and engagement, and we are also testing core search integration to streamline the search experience,” a Reddit spokesperson told me in an email. “Similar to how Reddit search works, there is currently no way for mods to opt out of or exclude content from their communities from Answers. However, Reddit Answers doesn’t include all content on Reddit; for example, it excludes content from private, quarantined, and NSFW communities, as well as some mature topics.”

After we reached out for comment and the Reddit user flagged the issue to the company, Reddit introduced an update that would prevent Reddit Answers from being suggested under conversations about “sensitive topics.”

“We rolled out an update designed to address and resolve this specific issue,” the Reddit spokesperson said. “This update ensures that ‘Related Answers’ to sensitive topics, which may have been previously visible on the post detail page (also known as the conversation page), will no longer be displayed. This change has been implemented to enhance user experience and maintain appropriate content visibility within the platform.”

The dangerous medical advice from Reddit Answers is not surprising given that Google AI infamously suggesting users eat glue was also based on data sourced from Reddit. Google paid $60 million a year for that data, and has a similar deal with OpenAI as well. According to Bloomberg, Reddit is currently trying to negotiate even more profitable deals with both companies.

Reddit’s data is valuable as AI training data because it contains millions of user-generated conversations about a ton of esoteric topics, from how to caulk your shower to personal experiences with drugs. Clearly, that doesn’t mean a large language model will always usefully parse that data. The glue incident was caused because the LLM didn’t understand the Reddit user who was suggesting it was joking.

The risk is that people may take whatever advice an LLM gives them at face value, especially when it’s presented to them in the context of a medical subreddit. For example, we recently reported about someone who was hospitalized after ChatGPT told them they could replace their table salt with sodium bromide.

Update: This story has been updated with additional comment from Reddit.

Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for Fucksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue

"You can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness."

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-17 01:00:35

Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia, says that it’s seeing a significant decline in human traffic to the online encyclopedia because more people are getting the information that’s on Wikipedia via generative AI chatbots that were trained on its articles and search engines that summarize them without actually clicking through to the site.

The Wikimedia Foundation said that this poses a risk to the long term sustainability of Wikipedia.

“We welcome new ways for people to gain knowledge. However, AI chatbots, search engines, and social platforms that use Wikipedia content must encourage more visitors to Wikipedia, so that the free knowledge that so many people and platforms depend on can continue to flow

Sustainably,” the Foundation’s Senior Director of Product Marshall Miller said in a blog post. “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”

Ironically, while generative AI and search engines are causing a decline in direct traffic to Wikipedia, its data is more valuable to them than ever. Wikipedia articles are some of the most common training data for AI models, and Google and other platforms have for years mined Wikipedia articles to power its Snippets and Knowledge Panels, which siphon traffic away from Wikipedia itself.

“Almost all large language models train on Wikipedia datasets, and search engines and social media platforms prioritize its information to respond to questions from their users,” Miller said. That means that people are reading the knowledge created by Wikimedia volunteers all over the internet, even if they don’t visit wikipedia.org— this human-created knowledge has become even more important to the spread of reliable information online.”

Miller said that in May 2025 Wikipedia noticed unusually high amounts of apparently human traffic originating mostly from Brazil. He didn’t go into details, but explained this caused the Foundation to update its bot detections systems.

“After making this revision, we are seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8% as compared to the same months in 2024,” he said. “We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.”

Miller told me in an email that Wikipedia has policies for third-party bots that crawl its content, such as specifying identifying information and following its robots.txt, and limits on request rate and concurrent requests.

“For obvious reasons, we can’t share details publicly about how exactly we block and detect bots,” he said. “In the case of the adjustment we made to data over the past few months, we observed a substantial increase over the level of traffic we expected, centering on a particular region, and there wasn’t a clear reason for it. When our engineers and analysts investigated the data, they discovered a new pattern of bot behavior, designed to appear human. We then adjusted our detection systems and re-applied them to the past several months of data. Because our bot detection has evolved over time, we can’t make exact comparisons – but this adjustment is showing the decline in human pageviews.”

The Foundation’s findings align with other research we’ve seen recently. In July, the Pew Research Center found that only 1 percent of Google searches resulted in the users clicking on the link in the AI summary, which takes them to the page Google is summarizing. In April, the Foundation previously reported that it was getting hammered by AI scrapers, a problem that has also plagued libraries, archives, and museums. Wikipedia editors are also acutely aware of the risk generative AI poses to the reliability of Wikipedia articles if its use is not moderated effectively.
Human pageviews to all language versions of Wikipedia since September 2021, with revised pageviews since April 2025 Image: Wikimedia Foundation.
“These declines are not unexpected. Search engines are increasingly using generative AI to provide answers directly to searchers rather than linking to sites like ours,” Miller said. “And younger generations are seeking information on social video platforms rather than the open web. This gradual shift is not unique to Wikipedia. Many other publishers and content platforms are reporting similar shifts as users spend more time on search engines, AI chatbots, and social media to find information. They are also experiencing the strain that these companies are putting on their infrastructure.”

Miller said that the Foundation is “enforcing policies, developing a framework for attribution, and developing new technical capabilities” in order to ensure third-parties responsibly access and reuse Wikipedia content, and continues to "strengthen" its partnerships with search engines and other large “re-users.” The Foundation, he said, is also working on bringing Wikipedia content to younger audiences via YouTube, TikTok, Roblox, and Instagram.

However, Miller also called on users to “choose online behaviors that support content integrity and content creation.”

“When you search for information online, look for citations and click through to the original source material,” he said. “Talk with the people you know about the importance of trusted, human curated knowledge, and help them understand that the content underlying generative AI was created by real people who deserve their support.”

AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums

"This is a moment where that community feels collectively under threat and isn't sure what the process is for solving the problem.”

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}