ADDISON, Texas — Revenge porn site PinkMeth keeps on getting yanked ... and keeps on coming back.
After PinkMeth.com was shut down by court order late last year, its operators chose to direct surfers through Twitter to PinkMeth.so.
But it didn't take long for Texas attorney Jason Van Dyke, who filed a $1 million suit in November on behalf of a woman who found her pictures on PinkMeth.com, to swing into action again.
In an unusual request, Van Dyke made a plea to Somali government officials to take down PinkMeth.so. The Somalia government, which oversees the .so top-level domain, agreed to his request.
"How do you tell Somali officials to take down a website? Van Dyke asked. "Well you complain to the Muslim majority there that a site like PinkMeth is an affront to the Koran."
But now that PinkMeth.com and PinkMeth.so have both gone away, operators have created at least three new websites — PinkMeth.Doxing.me, Pink.40oz.org and PinkMeth.sx — and have vowed on Twitter a new threat if additional domains are ordered closed.
"For every [PinkMeth] domain that's shut down, 3 new ones shall be created," a Twitter post at @pinkmeth says.
On Wednesday upon learning about the three new domain names, Van Dyke said he plans to continue to battle against the "faceless, unknown operators" of PinkMeth by serving lawsuits against their registrars.
"This is no longer a legal discussion; it is war," Van Dyke told XBIZ. "Since the individuals who are responsible for these crimes likely will evade service to the suit, we will go after their registrars and any other organization that supports their operation. It will be a battle of wills."
VanDyke said that he will be filing claims in the near future against those registrars — Dynadot LLC, Afilias and Network Solutions — that sold the three new domain names to seek an injunction to shut the sites down.
The attorney says that registrars have a duty to decline service to anonymous clients who commit crimes and tortious acts.
"I see no reason why they shouldn't be accountable as in any other product liability case," he said.
Revenge porn is a recent phenomenon where website operators have posted nude or erotic images of women or men without their consent. Much of the content is acquired illegally through computer hacking. Some revenge porn sites include actual email addresses, cell and home phone numbers, links to Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, and residential addresses displayed for all to see.
Operators of PinkMeth have not responded to numerous XBIZ attempts for comment.
