Characterizing the MrDeepFakes Sexual Deepfake Marketplace

TL;DR

This paper systematically analyzes the MrDeepFakes marketplace, revealing its economic dynamics, user behaviors, and attacker motivations behind the creation and distribution of sexual deepfake content.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive characterization of the MrDeepFakes marketplace, including its economics, user discussions, and attacker tactics, highlighting enforcement gaps and new attacker motivations.

Findings

Limited enforcement of posted rules.

Uncovered attacker motivations for deepfake creation.

Identified attacker tactics for resource acquisition.

Abstract

The prevalence of sexual deepfake material has exploded over the past several years. Attackers create and utilize deepfakes for many reasons: to seek sexual gratification, to harass and humiliate targets, or to exert power over an intimate partner. In part enabling this growth, several markets have emerged to support the buying and selling of sexual deepfake material. In this paper, we systematically characterize the most prominent and mainstream marketplace, MrDeepFakes. We analyze the marketplace economics, the targets of created media, and user discussions of how to create deepfakes, which we use to understand the current state-of-the-art in deepfake creation. Our work uncovers little enforcement of posted rules (e.g., limiting targeting to well-established celebrities), previously undocumented attacker motivations, and unexplored attacker tactics for acquiring resources to create sexual deepfakes.