LONDON — U.K. media regulator Ofcom is investigating two adult sites for possible failure to comply with age assurance requirements under the Online Safety Act, which Ofcom is charged with enforcing.
The companies involved are Itai Tech Ltd. and Score Internet Group LLC.
“Certain services failed to respond to our request and have not taken any steps to implement highly effective age assurance to protect children from pornography,” Ofcom said in a statement on Friday. “We are today opening investigations into Itai Tech Ltd — a service that runs the nudification site Undress.cc — and Score Internet Group LLC, which runs the site Scoreland.com. Both sites appear to have no highly effective age assurance in place and are potentially in breach of the Online Safety Act and their duties to protect children from pornography.”
Last year, Itai Tech was named in a lawsuit filed by the San Francisco city attorney’s office against a number of sites alleged to host nonconsensual deepfake pornography.
In April, Ofcom stated that thousands of sites accessible in the U.K. had begun implementing age assurance measures in response to its enforcement program, and that it would assess the age assurance measures of providers that had not responded.
“Services that have not responded or implemented age assurance will be passed to our enforcement team for further action,” an Ofcom representative told XBIZ at the time.
Issuance of guidelines and enforcement actions under the OSA have been slowly ramping up since the law took effect in 2023. Ofcom released its age assurance guidelines in January and has performed various forms of outreach to make information available to adult sites and platforms.