LONDON — U.K. media regulator Ofcom on Wednesday imposed a penalty of one million pounds, or approximately $1.3 million, on AVS Group Ltd. after an investigation concluded that the company had failed to implement robust age checks on 18 adult websites.
In July, XBIZ reported that Ofcom was investigating whether four companies operating adult websites had implemented requisite age assurance measures under the U.K.’s Online Safety Act (OSA), which mandates that sites that publish pornography must have “highly effective” age checks in place to prevent minors from accessing adult content. One of the companies was AVS Group.
In October, Ofcom issued an update asserting that its investigation showed “reasonable grounds” to believe AVS Group had failed to comply with OSA regulations, and that it was therefore issuing a provisional notice giving AVS Group 20 working days to respond.
On Thursday, Ofcom posted a new update stating, “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, the statement notes, AVS “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.”
The AVS-run websites that Ofcom investigated 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 and shemalez.tube.
The agency levied an additional fine of 50,000 pounds against AVS for failing to respond to information requests during the course of its investigation.
Ofcom’s enforcement powers include imposing even larger fines than the million-pound penalty against AVS — up to 18 million pounds or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue — as well as seeking a court order requiring payment providers or advertisers to withdraw their services from a platform, or even requiring ISPs to block access to a site in the U.K.