Your Saree Challenge Pictures Can End up as Deep Nude! Deepnude.com Is Back And Cyber Criminals Are Using It for Pornography, Catfish, Revenge Porn, Character Assassination and More

Your saree challenge pictures could end up as a nude! We are not resorting to victim-blaming here but recent reports say that Deep Nude a website that was under fire last year for creating fake nude pictures of clothed people is back and functioning.  After creating controversies last year the website was shut down, however, now it has made a return and Indian cybercriminals are said to have been using it for malicious intent, as per reports by the Hindu Apart from using Deepnude to target women, the cybercriminals are making use of this technology to make porn, catfish and blackmail people. The website Deepnude uses Artificial intelligence to make nudes of clothed people. In simpler term, they use the AI technology to take a simple clothed picture of a person, typically women and make it naked. DeepNude website which is said to be in the form of a camera app "having X-Ray feature to see through clothes". As #SareeTwitter Trends on Twitter, Women Share Pics of Themselves Draped in a Sari. 

However, Cybercrime agencies in Maharashtra are working towards tracking Deep Nude that within seconds generates a nude version of any uploaded picture. However, the officials working for the case said to the Hindu that the more worrying part is that there exist several versions of Deep Nude on the Internet, including an app and a Twitter Handle. One such page even seeks donations from users. Superintendent of Police, Maharashtra Cyber department, Balsing Rajput, said to the Hindu, "This is a serious crime and we have a team to monitor this and take stringent action. We are very proactive about taking action in such cases."

The website-created nude pictures can be misused in many ways. Right from blackmailing, catfishing, pornography, revenge porn and character assassination, there is really no stopping here.  "We have received information about pictures of women being morphed using Deep Nude and being used for nefarious purposes like blackmail, pornography and creating catfish accounts on dating apps. Information is being shared with the relevant police agencies and we are tracking this trend further," civilian cyber expert Shubham Singh said.

"Recent trends like the Saree Challenge, where women upload their pictures on their social media accounts and tag their friends, creating a chain, present endless opportunities to criminal elements to prey on them using websites like Deep Nude. It is best to have privacy settings that do not allow strangers access to pictures," a Cyber police officer said to the Hindu. The saree challenge sees women upload their pictures and then tag a lot of other women asking them to post their pictures online too. There are several other similar challenges where people ask each other to upload their pictures, especially during quarantine, there has been seen a rise in such online fun activity. However, cyber criminals maybe using these pictures for so many wrong reasons.  Operation Blackface has been stared by  Maharashtra Cyber which is said to be a campaign against online sexual exploitation of women and children in India.

Typically, elements who use such websites thrive on the fact that the victims are reluctant to register complaints for fear of the stigma attached to it. Officers stress on the importance of reporting such cases, so that swift action can be taken that can serve as a deterrent for others.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Apr 15, 2020 09:15 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).