Adult World News

Ofcom has fined the AVS Group of porn websites £1,050,000 with an ultimatum to fix its ID/age verification system by 6th December else it will face daily files of £1300 for 3 months or until it fixes its websites.

The AVS Group did in fact implement ID/Age verification for UK visitors which requires a verifiable email and a photo for age estimation. However ths system did not check that this was a selfie and any photo of an any adult seems to suffice.

The AVS Group Ltd sites are:

• pornzog.com
• txxx.com, txxx.tube
• upornia.com
• hdzog.com, hdzog.tube
• thegay.com, thegay.tube
• ooxxx.com
• hotmovs.com
• hclips.com
• vjav.com
• pornl.com
• voyeurhit.com
• manysex.com
• tubepornclassic.com
• shemalez.com, shemalez.tube.

These sites still require for UK viewers a valid email and a photo of an adult but are available using a VPN.

The BBC notes that Ofcom has never received any replies from queries to TubeCorporate, the company behind AVS Group Ltd. TubeCorporate apparently has a registered address in Belize that is shared with many other offshore companies, and it may prove difficult to enforce these fines.

 

Ofcom writes:

Ofcom has determined that AVS Group Ltd has failed to comply with section 12 of the Act and this failure is ongoing. Section 12 imposes a duty on providers of services that fall under Part 3 of the Act, and allow pornographic content, to ensure that children are prevented from encountering pornographic content through the use of highly effective age assurance.

From 25 July 2025 until at least 25 November 2025, each of the AVS Group websites either:

• did not implement any age assurance measures; or

• implemented measures that were not highly effective at determining whether a user was a child. In particular, AVS Group Ltd deployed a photo upload check on its services that does not include liveness detection and as such is vulnerable to circumvention by children (for example, by uploading a photo of an adult). Ofcom considers that this method is not capable of being highly effective within the meaning of the Act.

We are imposing a penalty on AVS Group Ltd of £1,000,000 in respect of the contravention of section 12. This penalty was set having regard to our Penalty Guidelines.

In addition, AVS Group Ltd is now required to comply with section 12 by taking steps to implement highly effective age assurance on all remaining AVS Group websites that do not currently have such measures in place by 5pm GMT on 6 December 2025.

Should AVS Group Ltd fail to comply with this requirement, a daily rate penalty of £1,000 per day will be imposed starting from 6 December 2025 until the section 12 duty is complied with or 16 March 2026, whichever is sooner.

Ofcom has also determined that AVS Group Ltd has failed to comply with section 102(8) of the Act by failing to respond to a statutory request for information within the specified time frame issued as part of the investigation. We are imposing a penalty on AVS Group Ltd of £50,000 in respect of the contravention of section 102(8). This penalty was set having regard to our Penalty Guidelines.

In addition, AVS Group Ltd is now required to take immediate steps to provide Ofcom with a complete list of all sites operated by AVS Group Ltd.

Should AVS Group Ltd fail to comply with this requirement, a daily rate penalty of £300 per day will be imposed starting from 4 December 2025 until the section 102(8) duty is complied with or 1 February 2026 whichever is sooner.

 

 

There are hardly any adult internet companies stupid enough to be based in Britain, as they have to suffer strangulation by onerous and expensive Ofcom red tape and of course, Ofcom content censorship.

Now Ofcom have yet quite established themselves as worldwide internet censors and any attempt to fine foreign companies is at risk of being ignored and setting this as a precedent for the way to deal with Ofcom international overreach. The first international fine issued by Ofcom is currently being ignored by the US website 4Chan.

So for a British linked company makes for a far easier target for Ofcom. One of the two directors of Itai Tech Ltd which owns undress.cc is registered at Companies House with a UK address. It is reported that company is now in the processing of removing this British connection and has self blocked its website from viewing from UK users.

Ofcom announced the fine as follows:

Ofcom has today issued a £50,000 fine against the provider of a nudification site for failing to use age-checks to protect children from online pornography.

Robust age checks are a cornerstone of the Online Safety Act and must be highly effective at correctly determining whether a particular user is a child.  Regulated services are also required, by law, to respond to Ofcom's requests for information in an accurate, complete and timely way, which is fundamental to our job as a regulator.

Earlier this year, we opened an enforcement programme to determine industry compliance with their age-check duties and, as part of this, issued statutory information requests to a range of companies.

An Ofcom investigation has today concluded that Itai Tech Ltd -- which runs the nudification site Undress.cc -- has failed to use highly effective age assurance to protect children from encountering pornographic content.

As a result, Ofcom has imposed a fine of £50,000 on Itai Tech Ltd, which takes into account the provider's decision to make the site unavailable to users with UK IP addresses shortly after we opened our investigation. An additional £5,000 penalty has been levied on the company on account of its failure to comply with a statutory information request.

Deadline 5 September

The Justice Committee of the Scottish Assembly has called for views on a proposal to introduce the Nordic system into Scotland. That system criminalises purchasers of sexual services.

The system was tried in Northern Ireland, and failed to reduce demand. It also increased levels of violence and abuse : See https://nationalsurvivornetwork.org/document/a-review-of-the-criminalisation-of-paying-for-sexual-services-in-northern-ireland/

Human rights organisations, charities, experts and others, have been trying to oppose the Nordic system, but need your help. (A starter list of 150 is here: https://decrimnow.org.uk/open-letter-on-the-nordic-model/ )

Scots also overwhelmingly reject the proposal to criminalise the purchase of sex. Only a small minority of 14% support new laws in this area: https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/snp-out-step-scots-overwhelmingly-32917246

However, it will certainly be pushed through unless it is opposed.

You can disagree with this draconian proposal, to help stop it becoming law, by entering Strongly oppose the creation of a new offence, or something similar, in response to Question 1 of the Committees consultation here : https://yourviews.parliament.scot/justice/prostitution-offences-support-bill/

The deadline is 5 September 2025. Responses can be made anonymously if desired and responding to the call for views, takes just a couple of minutes. (There are four other questions, around repealing the soliciting offence, quashing convictions around it, financial and other support, and other comments, which can be answered, according to the readers view, or may be left blank.)

However, note that most of the UK population believe both purchase and sale of sex should be legal : https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/48773-what-does-britain-think-of-sex-work-and-sex-workers

Please respond to the consultation even if you are not in Scotland, because, if adopted in Scotland the Nordic system will soon be forced on England and Wales too.  

So most of the major tube sites have decided to implement ID verification for UK viewers. But thankfully there are still plenty of options of websites that have not yet implemented ID verification requirements. Here is a useful list of porn sites to try to find those not inflicting ID verification: toppornsites.com .

For viewers stupidly subscribing to the risk of handing over ID to watch porn I noted that many websites were promising to not keep a copy of ID data provided for verification purposes and then immediately demanding an email address that will be kept for furture visits. Surely an email address is a key piece of identity data that should not be retained.

Surely a better idea is purchase a VPN and access porn as if in a different country from the UK. For the moment all the major porn sites stil allow access via VPN. Perhaps one day this will not be 5the case when ID verification is adopted worldwide. Also not that it is up to websites whether they allow access via VPN or not. Under threat of extreme punishment they could reasonably easily one day block access from VPNs. (as the likes of BBC and Netflix already do).

Another option is to install a tor browser (the onion ring I think). See torproject.org . This is a browser that looks bery much like Firefox but obtains page data via  complicated and encrypted routing that evades censorship and country specific blocking. It is not quite as 100% succesful as a VPN but can be used to watch porn on the main porn websites.

But of course the authorities will not be very pleased by these straightforward workarounds, and they have put in place a censorship rule to prevent adult websites from themselves promoting workarounds. According to Ofcom and the BBC, platforms must not host, share or permit content that encourages the use of VPNs to get around age checks and it will be illegal for them to do so.

An Aylo spokesperson, the parent company of Pornhub said parents are advised to block VPN usage just in case, and  told the BBC that the question of VPNs was an issue for governments, adding:

We certainly do not recommend that anyone uses technology to bypass the law.'

Aylo has publicly called for effective and enforceable age assurance solutions that protect minors online, while ensuring the safety and privacy of all users. The United Kingdom is the first country to present these same priorities demonstrably

Thankfully such censorship laws simply don't apply to websites out of Ofcom's remit so there will surely be plenty of sources of information available to workaround the dangers of ID verification for porn.

 

Update: VPNs galore

27th July 2025. From the Financial Times

The Financial Times has reported on the inevitably booming sales and downloads  of VPNs.

Proton VPN has leapfrogged ChatGPT to become the top free app in the UK, according to Apple. Proton VPN has experienced a 1800% increase in daily UK. sign-ups. NordVPN has seen 1000% increase in UK purchases.

A Proton spokesperson told Mashable:

This clearly shows that adults are concerned about the impact universal age verification laws will have on their privacy.