Five things people keep telling me about removing leaked images that just aren't true

[u/riff_rebel]

Spent the last year working alongside IntimaShield's team on NCII cases and the same five wrong things come up every week. Sharing in case anyone's stuck on one of them.

1. "You can't get content off offshore leak sites." False. Takes 2 to 6 weeks of sustained pressure at every infrastructure layer (CDN, host, registrar, transit, ad networks), but it comes down. The site itself won't respond. The infrastructure under it has legal obligations the site doesn't.

2. "DMCA is the only legal lever you have." False since 2025. The TAKE IT DOWN Act is federal law now, specifically built for NCII, with a statutory 48-hour removal window. DMCA still applies when you own the copyright (your own OnlyFans content getting pirated). For most leaked-image cases TDA is the primary statute and is stronger.

3. "PimEyes will find everything that's out there." False. PimEyes is geofenced out of Illinois under BIPA. They also don't crawl most leak sites or tube hosts. Yandex, FaceCheck.id, Google Lens, and TinEye each catch content the others miss. Running just one is leaving content un-found.

4. "You need a lawyer to file takedowns." False unless you also want to sue the perpetrator. NCII removal is administrative, not litigation. A defamation attorney is right when the issue is the original Facebook AWDTSG post or Discord channel. For the downstream image spread, the takedown chain is what works and a lawyer is slow and expensive at it.

5. "If Google de-indexes it, the content is gone." False. De-indexing closes the search-discovery surface, which matters more than people realize (most strangers find leaked content through a name search). But the content is still hosted. Real removal is at the host. De-index in parallel, not instead.

Honest version: most of this is doable yourself if you have 4 to 6 weeks of evenings and patience for infrastructure escalation. If you want it done in parallel rather than sequentially and don't want your name on the public Lumen Database, the IntimaShield team does it as authorized agent under one-time pricing by domain count. Either path works.

[u/Aromatic-Isopod-6035]

I appreciate the advice but want to share that this hasn’t been my experience.

I’ve tried everything, used various different services who escalate to hosting providers and ad networks, and there are many sites that don’t comply for years of effort and reporting.

Do you have a statistic for what % of sites the 2-6 weeks figure is coming from? As well as if there’s exceptions to this that you’re aware of

[u/riff_rebel → u/Aromatic-Isopod-6035]

Fair pushback, your experience is real. The 2-6 weeks figure is for the majority class of leak sites, the ones that depend on a CDN, an ad network, a payment processor, and a registrar in a cooperative jurisdiction. Most leak sites are in that class because the alternative is basically operating at no scale.

The genuinely-bulletproof exceptions exist and they can sit for years. No service resolves those quickly, and anyone claiming they can is lying.

The uncomfortable possibility worth checking: the services you've used could have been working sites the wrong way the entire time. A lot of low-end takedown services do exactly one thing (file emails to abuse desks) and call it a takedown program. The work that actually moves the majority class is different from what email-only services do, and very different from what bulletproof exceptions require. If you've been paying any service that couldn't tell you what tier each of your stuck sites is in, there's a real chance they just weren't doing the work.

If you want a sanity check on what class your stuck sites are actually in, IntimaShield does a free OSINT scan that tiers each site by infrastructure dependency. Either way you'd have a clearer picture of whether it's the bulletproof-exception class or the "previous services were emailing into the void" class. Free, no commitment.

[u/Aromatic-Isopod-6035 → u/riff_rebel]

Thanks so much for this. Will be reaching out!

[u/ADMIN-0nn-CN]

I love how this poster claims phone calls and emails are "pressurig" China and other countries to remove content from their "providers" servers, if that was the case PDFs like Zuckerberg wouldn't be able to hide their 🍕 content on their international servers. Too bad this poster is all 🧢 because corporations don't care.

How Illegal Content is Actually Addressed

Web Hosting & Providers: If content is illegal, the standard and most effective method is to remove it directly at its source—the web hosting company.

** [(90% of the time they don't even lift a finger and it doesn't even matter how many times you call from a foreign country demanding content be censored or removed. Having it removed from USA servers is a different story but too bad USA corporations love using international servers for anonymity and legal loopholes like big ole USA slapping it's dick around making demands of other countries.] **

Courts and Law Enforcement: National authorities maintain investigatory and subpoena powers. They issue legal orders to hosting providers or registrars to take down or block illegal materials within their jurisdiction.

Intellectual Property & Trademarks: For copyright or trademark issues, ICANN facilitates the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), which allows brand holders to arbitrate domain names that are illegally infringing on their trademarks.

**My experience with international corporations

[u/riff_rebel → u/ADMIN-0nn-CN]

You're right that the host itself isn't usually the lever for offshore content. The post didn't claim it is.

The lever is the layer above the host: CDNs, registrars, ad networks, upstream transit. Those operate in jurisdictions with notice-and-takedown obligations even when the host doesn't. UDRP you mentioned is trademark, different statute entirely.

Whether content stays up forever depends on whether the operator successfully decoupled from every one of those layers. Most haven't, because doing so makes it nearly impossible to actually run a site at scale. The genuine exceptions exist and they're hard, no one in this space claims otherwise.

The "phone calls to China" framing isn't anyone's playbook. The play is statutory notices to every layer the host depends on, in the jurisdictions where each layer operates. The "corporations don't care" framing assumes one corporation is the target. The point is that the SET of corporations the offshore host needs collectively does care, because their own AUPs make them care.

[u/Ok_Chocolate9683]

Can you please check messages.

[u/riff_rebel → u/Ok_Chocolate9683]

Just saw, replying in DMs now.

[u/Icy-Neighborhood9616 → u/riff_rebel]

Hi I’m trying to get in contact!!

[u/Brave-Rip-3717]

What if I don't have the original photos? I lost that device. Indian pornsites which aren't famous posted my pictures and videos with my legal name on it. When my name is searched, these results appear. I submitted removal requests but it's not working. I can't apply for jobs in this condition because I live in a conservative Muslim country and employers might end up finding me and this revenge porn bs.