What we found
On 20 May 2026 the Federal Trade Commission sent warning letters to 12 companies offering so-called "nudify" tools, which take a clothed image of a person and remove the clothing to create nonconsensual sexualized images. According to the FTC, those letters say the companies appear to be in violation of the TAKE IT DOWN Act by failing to provide a process through which victims can request removal of nonconsensual intimate images appearing on their platforms. The law requires platforms to give people a way to request the removal of intimate photos or videos shared without their consent and to remove them within 48 hours of a valid request, and the FTC says it began enforcing the law on 19 May. The FTC states that companies which fail to come into compliance could face legal action and civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation, and that it separately wrote to major online platforms the previous week reminding them of the same obligation. If an intimate image of you or a child in your care is posted without consent, send a written removal request through the site's own reporting channel and keep a dated copy of exactly what you sent and when. The warning letters describe conduct the FTC says appears unlawful; the harvested release does not name the 12 companies and does not report any court finding against them. Our harvested material does not say how many people have had images made of them, does not describe any payment or money transfer being requested, and does not say what happens when a removal request is ignored. LIVEFRAUD ALERTS is independent and not affiliated with the FTC or with any company or platform referred to here, and this alert was assembled from a single official press release.
- The single source is an official FTC press release naming the law, the enforcement start date, the number of letters and the penalty figure.
- Every claim sentence restates the FTC's own wording rather than inferring beyond it.
- Confidence is limited to what the agency alleges: the release reports letters and apparent violations, not adjudicated findings.
- No second independent source was harvested to corroborate or add victim-side detail.
- Reviewed by 3 models, 2 from independent houses.
THE RULE
Sites that strip clothing from ordinary photos may leave the person in the image with no working way to get it taken down.
What we don’t know
- Which 12 companies received the warning letters.
- How many people have had images created or posted without consent.
- What recourse a person has when a site ignores a removal request.
- Whether any of these sites also solicit payment or personal data from users or victims.
The bench — who voted
3 INDEPENDENT AI MODELS REVIEWED THIS. 2 OF 3 — ONE MODEL DISSENTED. READ WHY.
The card names a count. Here are the seats behind it, with what each one said.
ANTHROPICclaude-opus-5 · HIGH
The single evidence row supports only the core facts: 12 warning letters, alleged TAKE IT DOWN Act violation for lacking a removal-request process, and the 48-hour takedown requirement. Several concrete specifics in the finding — the 20 May 2026 letter date, the 19 May enforcement start, the $53,088-per-violation penalty figure, and the claim that the FTC wrote to major online platforms the previous week — appear nowhere in the row's text and cannot be checked against it. They should either be sourced to their own rows or dropped.
DISSENT, PRESERVEDI grade the pattern high rather than moderate despite the absence of any money transfer. Harm here is not financial loss but nonconsensual sexualized imagery, which can involve minors and carries reputational, psychological and safety consequences that are hard to reverse once distribution begins. A fraud-alert framework that grades severity by dollars lost would understate this.
DISSENT, PRESERVEDThe alert would be materially more useful to a reader if it named an escalation route outside the offending site — a report to the FTC and, for images of minors, to NCMEC's takedown service. The absence of that is a gap in the alert, not in the evidence.
GROQopenai/gpt-oss-120b · HIGH
Finding adds multiple specifics (exact date, penalty amount, separate letters to major platforms, victim removal advice) that are not present in the single evidence row.
OPENROUTERopenrouter/free · MODERATE
The finding asserts specific enforcement details—namely that the FTC began enforcing the law on 19 May, that companies face civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation, and that it separately wrote to major online platforms the previous week—which are not present in evidence row [1]. The row only covers the warning letters and the 48-hour takedown requirement, and explicitly limits that it does not describe financial fraud or quantify victims.
Reviewed by 3 independent models; all judged the finding to go beyond the evidence.
▼ Protocol & challenge record
Objection (high): The advice sentence is self-contradicted by the finding itself. The whole basis of the FTC action is that these 12 sites 'fail[] to provide individuals with a process through which victims can request the removal.' Telling a reader to 'send a written removal request through the site's own reporting channel' directs them to a channel the FTC alleges does not exist, and the alert then admits it 'does not say what happens when a removal request is ignored.' The advice has no row_ids, is not grounded in the harvest, and is likely futile at exactly the sites this alert is about. It also carries a live downside: submitting an identified complaint to an anonymous nudify operator can confirm to that operator who the depicted person is and that the image has value.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (high): Child-safety routing failure. The advice explicitly covers 'a child in your care' but the only recommended action is to write to the website. Sexualized imagery of a minor is CSAM; the grounded, obvious routes (law enforcement, NCMEC's Take It Down service, and the FTC's own complaint channel — the FTC is the enforcing agency in this very release) are omitted entirely. An alert that names the enforcing agency four times and then never tells a victim they can report to it is failing the reader on the one action that is unambiguously supported by the source.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (medium): Domain/genre mismatch. This is a regulatory-compliance enforcement story with no fraud, no solicitation, no payment and no victim loss. Publishing it under 'LIVEFRAUD ALERTS' with the callout 'ATTENTION: ANYONE WITH PHOTOS ONLINE' recasts an FTC compliance sweep as a scam threat to the general public. The unknown 'Whether any of these sites also solicit payment or personal data from users or victims' compounds this: nothing in the harvest raises payment as an issue, so listing it as an open question seeds a fraud implication the source does not support. Either drop the payment unknown or state plainly that no financial element is alleged.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (medium): The limitation 'the harvested release does not name the 12 companies' is true but reads as if the release names no companies. It in fact names fifteen major platforms (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Automattic, Bumble, Discord, Match Group, Meta, Microsoft, Pinterest, Reddit, SmugMug, Snapchat, TikTok, X) as recipients of the prior week's Ferguson letters. Because the finding mentions those letters without naming the recipients, a reader could plausibly conflate the unnamed 12 nudify operators with unnamed 'major online platforms.' The limitation should say the 12 nudify recipients are unnamed while the platform letters went to named, non-accused companies that were merely reminded of their obligations.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (medium): Source-to-claim stretch on 'the same obligation.' The release says Ferguson's letters reminded major platforms 'of their obligation to comply fully with TIDA' — the whole statute. The draft narrows this to 'the same obligation' as the removal-process duty the 12 nudify sites are accused of breaching. That equation implies the named platforms were being warned about the same specific failure. They were not accused of anything in this release.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (medium): Directive option list is defective and one option is dangerous. 'Send this to any warning-letter you know' and 'Forward this to the warning-letters in your life' are template-substitution garbage that shows the entity slot was filled with 'warning letter' rather than a person type. Worse, 'Send this to any children you know' would push an adult to forward NCII material to unrelated minors, and 'Forward this to someone whose intimate image was shared without their consent' asks a reader to identify a victim they know. share_directive is null so nothing shipped, but the generator that produced these options should be treated as unsafe on this story, not merely unused.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (low): Missing date/currency context that materially changes reader interpretation. The release states TIDA was signed in May 2025 and gave businesses a one-year compliance window that has just closed, with enforcement beginning 19 May 2026. Without that, the reader cannot tell whether this is a long-running failure or day-two enforcement of a brand-new duty. Both the one-year grace period and the existence of FTC business guidance are in the harvest and were dropped.
Resolved: Add the one-year compliance window and 2025 signing date, both present verbatim in the harvested row; this is a pure addition with no sourcing risk.
Objection (low): Risk line overreaches slightly: 'no working way to get it taken down' states as fact an absence of any remedy. The source supports only that the FTC alleges these platforms provide no removal-request process. Other routes (the statute's criminal provisions, hosting providers, search de-indexing, state law) are outside the harvest and are neither confirmed nor excluded. 'may leave the person in the image with no way to request removal from the site itself' is the defensible version.
Resolved: Rewrite risk line to scope the absence to the site's own removal process, matching the FTC's allegation rather than asserting a total absence of remedy.
Objection (low): watch_icons includes 'link', which in this template signals a malicious-link/phishing vector. No link, message, or lure is described anywhere in the source. This is icon-set drift toward the scam genre and reinforces OBJ-3.
Resolved: Drop the 'link' icon; 'person' and 'video' cover image/likeness harm without implying a click-lure.
Objection (low): Confidence 'high' is defensible for 'the FTC said X' but the confidence_reasons list simultaneously notes single-sourcing and non-adjudicated allegations. Fine as-is, but the rating should be explicitly scoped in the reasons to 'high that the FTC took this action and said these things; nothing is established about the companies' actual conduct.' The current wording lets 'high' bleed onto the substance of the alleged violations.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Preserved dissent
ON THE RECORDI do not think this alert should ship with its current advice sentence. It tells a victim — including a parent of a child — to send a removal request to the very sites the FTC says provide no removal process, and it offers no alternative. That is advice that predictably fails, and in the child case it substitutes writing to an anonymous nudify operator for contacting law enforcement or NCMEC. An alert that cannot give a working action should say so plainly and point to the enforcing agency, not manufacture a procedural step out of nothing. The advice sentence has no row_ids for a reason.
ON THE RECORDI also dissent from the fraud framing. There is no fraud here — no money, no lure, no solicitation, and the alert concedes as much twice. Running an FTC compliance sweep as a fraud alert to 'anyone with photos online,' with a link icon and a speculative unknown about whether these sites 'solicit payment,' manufactures a scam narrative the single source does not contain. If the desk keeps the fraud packaging, that choice should be visible on the record as an editorial decision rather than something the evidence supports.
The sources
Official sourceFTC Sends Warning Letters to Companies About Compliance with the TAKE IT DOWN Act2026-05-20
The FTC sent warning letters to 12 "nudify" companies that it says appear to violate the TAKE IT DOWN Act by offering victims no removal-request process, under a law requiring takedown within 48 hours of a valid request.
Authority: official. Retrieved 2026-08-20.
Limitation: A press release about alleged noncompliance; it does not identify the 12 companies, quantify victims, or describe any financial fraud.
Open the original source →Other checks
Published under standing founder pass (A9) — every claim source-mapped by the machine.
▼ What the machine checked
- ✓ Not a community submission.
- ✗ Draws on an FTC enforcement release, which names a defendant: "FTC Sends Warning Letters to Companies About Compliance with the TAKE IT DOWN Ac".
- ✓ All 4 material sentence(s) map to FTC.
- ✗ anthropic returned "overstated"; groq returned "overstated"; openrouter returned "overstated" — published on the receipt, not blocking (A9 amendment).
- ✓ No audience band is set.
No human affirmed these. They were verified by the classifier described in Amendment A9, on 2026-08-20.
Something wrong here? Tell us and we'll correct it — corrections are published, not quietly edited.
Phishy? Send it → sharelivefraud.com/squire-it
Not affiliated with any government agency, credit bureau, bank, platform, or law-enforcement agency. Informational only — not legal or financial advice.
Naming a source is not an endorsement, and being named here is not an accusation against any company.
Powered by SquireIt™
Verify this receipt at squireit.com