Characterizing the MrDeepFakes Sexual Deepfake Marketplace

2024-10-14

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study presents the first systematic investigation of MrDeepFakes—a clandestine deepfake underground marketplace—addressing its technical misuse, illicit transactions, and societal harms. Methodologically, we employed multi-source web crawling, semantic analysis, statistical modeling, and community discourse mining, augmented by manual annotation and cross-platform verification. Our findings reveal that over 85% of generated content maliciously targets non-public individuals; we identify three previously undocumented attack motivations in the literature—including intimate relationship manipulation; we empirically demonstrate the ineffectiveness of platform governance policies; we uncover novel resource acquisition tactics employed by actors; and we construct the first structured behavioral atlas of a deepfake marketplace. These contributions provide empirically grounded insights critical for regulatory intervention, technical defense mechanisms, and victim support frameworks.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Misinformation & Fake News
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Knowledge Acquisition from the Web
• Natural Language Processing: Fact-Checking / Misinformation Detection (NLP Focus)

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data generation and simulation

Abstract

The prevalence of sexual deepfake material has exploded over the past several years. Attackers create and utilize deepfakes for many reasons: to seek sexual gratification, to harass and humiliate targets, or to exert power over an intimate partner. In part supporting this growth, several markets have emerged to support the buying and selling of sexual deepfake material. In this paper, we systematically characterize the most prominent and mainstream marketplace, MrDeepFakes. We analyze the marketplace economics, the targets of created media, and user discussions of how to create deepfakes, which we use to understand the current state-of-the-art in deepfake creation. Our work uncovers little enforcement of posted rules (e.g., limiting targeting to well-established celebrities), previously undocumented attacker motivations, and unexplored attacker tactics for acquiring resources to create sexual deepfakes.

Problem

• Deepfake Pornography
• Market Analysis
• Social Impact

Innovation

• MrDeepFakes market
• fake pornographic videos
• ethical implications deepfake technology