Online safety research
Nudify Apps and Undress AI Nude Tools: What Real Cases and Research Show
Every month, millions of people type queries like nudify app, undress ai nude or nudify.online into search engines. What sits behind those searches is not a neutral photo trick. It is a market built on fabricating sexual images of real people without consent, and the damage is documented in court filings, police reports and independent research. This article collects the real cases, the numbers and the history that most ranking pages leave out.
Key takeaways
- check_circleA nudify app uses generative AI to fabricate a nude image of a real person from an ordinary clothed photo, without that person's consent.
- check_circleThe category began with DeepNude in 2019. Its creator shut it down within a day of public exposure, but web clones multiplied: Graphika counted roughly 24 million visits to 34 nudify services in a single month of 2023.
- check_circleDocumented cases include schoolgirls in Almendralejo (Spain), students in Westfield (New Jersey) and Melbourne (Australia), and the Taylor Swift deepfake wave on X in January 2024.
- check_circlePeople who use these apps risk payment fraud, photo theft and prosecution. Victims can limit the spread with StopNCII.org and Take It Down from NCMEC.
What is a nudify app?
A nudify app is a service that takes a normal clothed photo of a real person and generates a fake nude or sexualized version of it. The result is synthetic. The model invents a body that was never photographed, but it keeps the person's real face, which is exactly what makes the output abusive.
The typical input is an ordinary photo taken from Instagram, TikTok or a school yearbook page. The typical victim never agreed to anything. A close relative is face swap porn, where a real face is placed onto existing explicit photos or videos instead of generating a body from scratch. Both belong to what researchers and prosecutors call synthetic non consensual intimate imagery, often shortened to synthetic NCII or image based sexual abuse.
From DeepNude to nudify.online: a short history of nudify apps
The nudify category began with DeepNude, a $50 desktop app released in early 2019 that used a GAN to fake nudes of women. Its creator killed it less than 24 hours after journalists exposed it, yet the idea proved unstoppable: web clones, Telegram bots and app store listings kept the model alive and growing.
- Early 2019
DeepNude goes on sale. A developer known only as Alberto releases the app for Windows and Linux at $50. It uses a generative adversarial network trained on thousands of nude images and works only on photos of women. The free version stamps a large watermark on results; the paid version uses a small one that is easy to crop out.
- June 26, 2019
Vice Motherboard publishes its investigation. Reporter Samantha Cole shows what the app does and who it targets. Traffic crashes the DeepNude servers within hours.
- June 27, 2019
The creator shuts DeepNude down and offers refunds, writing that "the probability that people will misuse it is too high" and "we don't want to make money this way." Katelyn Bowden, founder of the anti image abuse group Badass, had called the app "terrifying," warning that anyone could become a victim without ever taking a nude photo.
- July 2019
GitHub removes DeepNude repositories, including one run by the app's own creator, citing rules against sexually obscene content. Copies keep circulating anyway.
- 2020
The model moves to Telegram. Sensity documents a bot ecosystem that had generated more than 100,000 fake nude images, most of them of private individuals rather than celebrities.
- 2023
Industrial scale. Graphika identifies 34 nudify providers with about 24 million visits in September alone, and link spam promoting them grows by more than 2,000 percent over the year.
- 2024
Enforcement catches up. San Francisco's city attorney sues 16 of the most visited undress websites, and reporting by 404 Media pushes Apple and Google to pull nudify apps from their app stores.
- 2025
The largest face swap hub closes. MrDeepFakes shuts down after losing critical service providers, while smaller nudify sites and Telegram bots continue to rotate domains.
How big is the undress AI nude problem? Research and numbers
The problem is industrial in scale. Independent researchers tracking these services count tens of millions of visits per month, and nearly all deepfake content online is sexual and targets women.
| Source | Year | Finding |
|---|---|---|
| Graphika, report on synthetic NCII | 2023 | Identified 34 nudify providers with about 24 million visits in September 2023 alone. Spam links promoting these services on X and Reddit grew by more than 2,000 percent from the start of that year. |
| Security Hero, State of Deepfakes | 2023 | About 98 percent of all deepfake videos online are pornographic, and roughly 99 percent of the individuals targeted are women. |
| Sensity, Telegram bot investigation | 2020 | Documented a Telegram ecosystem built around a DeepNude style bot that had produced more than 100,000 fake nude images, the majority depicting private individuals, not public figures. |
| San Francisco City Attorney, civil lawsuit against 16 undress websites | 2024 | Court filing states the 16 sites received more than 200 million visits in the first six months of 2024 and describes them as operated anonymously with no accountability to victims. |
| Internet Watch Foundation | 2024 | Confirmed a growing share of reports involving AI generated child sexual abuse imagery, including material produced from ordinary photos of real children. |
Real cases that show the damage
Statistics describe scale. Cases describe what it looks like when it happens to a specific person, classroom or school.
Taylor Swift and the deepfake wave on X
In late January 2024, AI generated explicit images of Taylor Swift spread across X. One post was viewed more than 45 million times before removal. The platform reacted by temporarily blocking searches for her name, an almost unprecedented step. The episode pushed the White House and members of Congress to comment publicly on synthetic NCII within days.
Schoolgirls as young as 11 targeted in their hometown
In September 2023, mothers in the small town of Almendralejo discovered that fake nude images of their daughters were circulating in local chat groups. More than 20 girls were affected, some as young as 11. The images had been produced from ordinary social media photos using a nudify app, and some victims were blackmailed. Police identified juvenile suspects, and the case became a national scandal in Spain.
Westfield High School
In October 2023, students at Westfield High School learned that boys had used an AI tool to create fake nude images of female classmates and shared them in a group chat. Families said the school had no policy for a crime that barely existed a year earlier. The case triggered student walkouts and became one of the examples cited in the US debate over deepfake legislation.
Bacchus Marsh Grammar
In June 2024, around 50 girls at Bacchus Marsh Grammar in Victoria found fabricated explicit images of themselves circulating online, made from photos lifted off social media. Victoria Police arrested a teenage boy in connection with the case. Australia's eSafety Commissioner has since treated synthetic image based abuse as a priority enforcement area.
Telegram deepfake rings targeting schools
In August 2024, South Korean journalists and activists exposed networks of Telegram chat rooms producing deepfake pornography of women and girls, including material organized by specific schools and universities. Lists of targeted institutions circulated publicly, and the government announced emergency measures. The episode showed how face swap porn scales when generation takes seconds and distribution is anonymous.
Face swap porn: the other half of the market
Face swap porn maps a real person's face onto someone else's body in existing sexual photos or videos. It differs from a nudify app in technique, not in outcome: a real identity is attached to sexual content that person never made.
The January 2023 scandal around streamer QTCinderella showed the mechanics in public. After a popular streamer was caught viewing a deepfake site that hosted fake explicit content of her and other female creators, her tearful response video was watched millions of times. The site in question later shut down, but copies appeared within weeks.
The largest hub of this ecosystem, MrDeepFakes, shut down in May 2025 after losing critical service providers, following years of pressure from researchers and platforms. Shutdowns help, but the Graphika data shows why the market persists: when one domain disappears, referral traffic moves to the next one within days.
What searches for "nudify app" and "undress ai nude" actually lead to
Search data shows a cluster of queries that funnel users toward this category of service. The main three, and their common variants:
According to lawsuits and security researchers, the services behind these queries tend to share the same traits:
- person_offAnonymous operators. The San Francisco complaint describes sites with no identifiable owner, no real company address and no channel for victims to request removal.
- paymentsPayment friction by design. Card and crypto payments with no refunds, aggressive upsells, and business models that rely on users being too embarrassed to dispute charges.
- cloud_uploadUnknown photo retention. Users upload photos of other people to servers with no verifiable privacy policy. What happens to those uploads afterward is unknowable by design.
- ads_clickAdvertising through mainstream platforms. Reporting by 404 Media found nudify app ads running on Meta platforms, and nudify apps listed in the Apple App Store and Google Play, removed only after journalists flagged them.
Risks for people who use a nudify app
The risks of using these tools fall on the user as much as on the victim: fraud exposure, data theft, and prosecution in a growing list of jurisdictions.
Anonymous operators plus card payments plus zero refund policy is the classic profile of a scam storefront. Victims of the images are not the only people these sites exploit.
Uploading someone's photo means handing a stranger's biometric face data to an anonymous server. Your own payment details sit in the same database.
The Melbourne case ended with an arrest. The Spanish case went to juvenile court. The FBI warned in a June 2023 public service announcement that manipulated images from social media are used in sextortion schemes, and creating or sharing them can carry federal consequences.
If the person in the photo is under 18, the output is treated as child sexual abuse material in the US, UK, EU and Australia, synthetic or not. This is the single most prosecuted category of online crime, and "the AI made it" is not a defense investigators accept.
What to do if someone made a fake nude of you
Act in this order: preserve evidence first, then limit spread, then report. Removal tools exist and are free.
- Preserve evidence. Screenshot the content, copy URLs and usernames, note dates. Do this before reporting, because takedown deletes the evidence with the content.
- Stop the spread with hashing tools. If you are 18 or older, StopNCII.org creates a digital fingerprint of the image on your own device and shares only the hash with partner platforms, including Meta and TikTok, to block reuploads. If the original photo was taken before you turned 18, use Take It Down from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which works the same way.
- Report to the platform hosting the content. Every major platform now has a dedicated category for non consensual intimate imagery, synthetic included.
- Request removal from Google Search through its non consensual explicit imagery removal form, so the content stops surfacing even if a copy stays online.
- Report to police. Bring the preserved evidence. In the US, the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative runs a crisis helpline at 1-844-878-2274. Elsewhere, ask for the unit handling image based abuse.
FAQ
What is a nudify app?expand_more
A nudify app is a tool that takes a normal clothed photo of a real person and uses generative AI to fabricate a fake nude or sexualized image of that person. The output is synthetic, but it is created without consent and is treated in many jurisdictions as image based abuse. The category started with the DeepNude desktop app in 2019.
What happened to DeepNude?expand_more
DeepNude was a $50 desktop app released in 2019 by a developer known as Alberto. It used a GAN trained on nude images to fake nudes of women. On June 27, 2019, less than 24 hours after a Vice Motherboard investigation, the creator shut it down and offered refunds, saying the probability of misuse was too high. GitHub removed DeepNude repositories the following month.
Are nudify apps legal?expand_more
In many countries and US states, creating or sharing fake sexual images of real people without consent is a crime, and users have already faced arrests, school discipline and civil lawsuits. When the person in the photo is a minor, the output is treated as child sexual abuse material, one of the most serious categories of online crime.
Do undress AI nude tools show real photos?expand_more
No. A nudify app cannot see through clothing. It invents a synthetic body that never existed. The harm, however, is real: viewers often believe the image, and victims report the same shame, harassment and reputational damage as if a real photo had leaked.
Is it safe to upload photos or pay on sites like nudify.online?expand_more
The documented risks apply to this whole category of service. Most of these sites are run anonymously, publish no verifiable privacy policy, and require card or crypto payments. Lawsuits and security researchers describe operators with no accountability, unclear photo retention, and business models built on charge disputes and data harvesting.
What is face swap porn?expand_more
Face swap porn is a type of deepfake where a real person's face is mapped onto someone else's body in existing sexual photos or videos. Unlike nudify apps, which fabricate a body from a clothed photo, face swapping hijacks existing explicit content. Research from Security Hero found that about 98 percent of deepfake videos online are pornographic, and about 99 percent of the people targeted are women.
What should I do if someone made a fake nude of me?expand_more
Save evidence (links, screenshots, usernames) before anything is deleted, report the content to the platform, and create a digital fingerprint of the image with StopNCII.org if you are 18 or older, or with Take It Down from NCMEC if you were under 18 when the original photo was taken. Then file a removal request with Google and report the case to local police.
Can nudify apps be used on photos of minors?expand_more
Technically yes, and it has already happened in documented school cases in Spain, the United States and Australia. Legally, the output is child sexual abuse material regardless of being synthetic. The Internet Watch Foundation has confirmed a growing number of reports involving AI generated child sexual abuse imagery.
Why do nudify apps keep appearing if they cause harm?expand_more
Because they are cheap to run and profitable. Graphika counted about 24 million visits to 34 nudify services in one month of 2023, and a San Francisco lawsuit reported more than 200 million visits to 16 such sites in the first half of 2024. Anonymous operators relaunch under new domains as soon as payment processors or hosts cut them off.
Sources and further reading
- linkVice Motherboard, original DeepNude investigation and shutdown coverage, June 2019 (vice.com).
- linkThe Verge, "Controversial deepfake app DeepNude shuts down hours after being exposed," June 27, 2019, and "GitHub is banning copies of DeepNude," July 9, 2019 (theverge.com).
- linkBBC News, "App that can remove women's clothes from images shut down," June 28, 2019 (bbc.co.uk).
- linkGraphika, report on synthetic NCII providers, December 2023 (graphika.com).
- linkSecurity Hero, "The State of Deepfakes: Landscape, Threats, and Impact," 2023 (securityhero.io).
- linkSensity, investigation into deepfake bots on Telegram, 2020 (sensity.ai).
- linkSan Francisco City Attorney David Chiu, lawsuit against 16 "undress" websites, August 2024 (sfcityattorney.org).
- linkFBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, public service announcement on sextortion with manipulated images, June 2023 (ic3.gov).
- link404 Media, reporting on nudify apps in app stores and undress app advertising on Meta platforms, 2024 (404media.co).
- linkInternet Watch Foundation, reporting on AI generated child sexual abuse imagery, 2024 (iwf.org.uk).
- linkStopNCII.org (adults) and Take It Down by NCMEC (minors), image hashing tools (stopncii.org, takeitdown.ncmec.org).
- linkPress coverage of the Almendralejo case (September 2023), Westfield High School case (October 2023), Bacchus Marsh Grammar case (June 2024), and South Korea Telegram investigations (August 2024).