Canadian pharmacist's double life: Key person behind world's most notorious deepfake porn site

David Do is, on the surface, unassuming and respectable. He owns a house just outside Toronto with his partner, drives a Tesla and is paid $121,000 a year as a hospital pharmacist.

But he leads a double life as a key person behind the world's most notorious website for non-consensual, AI-generated porn of real people: MrDeepFakes.com. He has never been fully identified until now.

MrDeepFakes was the most popular site globally for deepfake porn, and hosted tens of thousands of non-consensual and sometimes violent deepfake videos and images of celebrities, politicians, social media influencers and private citizens, including Canadians.

This week, after CBC News's visual investigations unit — in collaboration with open-source investigative outlet Bellingcat and Danish publications Politiken and Tjekdet — contacted Do about his role in the site's operations, MrDeepFakes shut down for good.

A message posted to the site's homepage states that a "critical service provider has terminated service permanently," adding that the site "will not be relaunching."

The site had more than 650,000 users, some of whom charged hundreds of dollars to create custom videos. And the content — which ranges from graphic strangulation scenes involving an AI fake of actor Scarlett Johansson to group sex with actor Natalie Portman to masturbation videos of musician Michael Bublé — has gotten more than two billion views since the site's inception in 2018. 

But not everyone on the site was a Hollywood actor or famous singer.

"[It's] quite violating," said Sarah Z., a Vancouver-based YouTuber who CBC News found was the subject of several deepfake porn images and videos on the website. "For anybody who does think that these images are harmless, just please consider that they're really not. These are real people … who often suffer reputational and psychological damage."

Creators on the site also took requests from people asking for deepfake porn of their partners and wives.

Sharing non-consensual deepfake porn is illegal in several countries, including South Korea, Australia and the U.K. It is also illegal in several U.S. states, and while there is no federal law yet, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill banning it in April.

However, it's not a crime in Canada. Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged to pass a law criminalizing it during his federal election campaign, saying, "We will make producing and distributing non-consensual sexual deepfakes a criminal offence." 

David Do took care to hide his association with MrDeepFakes; his name never appeared anywhere on the site. But Do's role can be pieced together using data from the web, public records and forensic analysis of the site.

According to that research, Do had a central role in running the MrDeepFakes site and has a long online history discussing the details of operating a popular adult website that makes a profit.

CBC News, over a period of several weeks, sent multiple emails to Do seeking a response. Despite opening the emails several times, according to mail trackers attached to the emails, he never responded.