Adult content creators targeted by scammers are having government websites taken down.

      OnlyFans creators are combating piracy and addressing compromised government websites.

      Adult content creators consistently face challenges from scammers and pirates who steal their images, videos, and sometimes even identities. Now, this difficult cleanup effort is resulting in an unexpected consequence: the cleanup of government websites.

      Scammers have been infiltrating reputable .gov and .edu domains, filling them with pages that claim to feature leaked OnlyFans content. This has led to hacked government and university sites going missing from Google Search results. Frequently, these pages contain no stolen content; instead, they exploit the names of popular creators to entice visitors into dating scams or other dubious advertisements and harmful downloads.

      Scammers are taking advantage of the government’s search ranking.

      This method is referred to as parasite SEO. The attackers take advantage of vulnerable sites that have strong reputations and search authority, which allows their scam pages to appear more legitimate and rank higher than they would on a newly created site. Government and educational institutions are particularly appealing targets as users tend to naturally trust their web addresses.

      An analysis from cybersecurity firm UpGuard (via WIRED) found adult-content-related copyright complaints linked to 2,167 government and educational domains across 80 countries. The data included 384,286 takedown requests and 631,193 reported URLs from September 2011 to May 2026, comprising 646 government websites and 1,521 educational institutions.

      This problem has become notably more prominent since 2020, as OnlyFans expanded and numerous individual creators started working with specialized companies to monitor for pirated content. As a result, a vast network of scanners now continuously searches the web for creator names, images, and supposed leaks.

      Copyright complaints have unintentionally turned into a security measure.

      When these scanners encounter questionable pages on compromised government domains, removal agencies can file Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaints with Google. UpGuard discovered that Google removed 132,266 reported URLs, while over 468,000 received no action, and roughly 20,000 were already missing from its index.

      While removing a search result does not fix the vulnerable website, it can reduce the scammer’s main source of unwitting visitors, as many of these pages have little visibility outside of Google. Unfortunately, scammers have become aware of this process, often using some creators' names as bait without hosting any copyrighted material, leading cybersecurity and legal experts to debate whether DMCA complaints are always the fitting response.