Porn company starts new age checks after £1m fine

The UK’s media regulator says a porn company it fined £1m for failing to comply with the Online Safety Act has started to include more robust age checks on some of its websites.

On 4 December Ofcom announced the £1m fine of AVS Group Ltd, which runs a number of pornographic websites, for not having good enough age verification methods.

An Ofcom spokesperson said since the decision, AVS has now implemented a “highly effective age assurance method on certain websites”, which was able to tell whether or not a child was using the site.

It added the group could still incur fines of £1,000 per day, until the body was “satisfied” with the changes it had made across all of its platforms.

Ofcom had also fined AVS an extra £50,000 for not responding to its emails since its investigation began in July.

When asked if it had since heard from AVS, the regulator said it could not comment on an ongoing open investigation.

After last week’s £1m fine was announced, BBC News contacted a company called TubeCorporate, the adult content publishing platform behind AVS group Ltd sites, for a response, but is yet to receive one.

The address which the firm uses is in the central American country Belize, and appears to be the registered address of a large number of companies – although it does not have physical offices there.

The UK’s Online Safety Act makes it a legal requirement for websites that host pornographic material to put in place what the regulator determines to be “highly effective age assurance” to prevent children from being able to easily access explicit content.

Tougher age checks for porn websites were introduced in July, though some people have pointed out these could be easily avoided with a virtual private network (VPN), which reroutes internet traffic via a different country.

A recent Ofcom report into the UK’s media habits found VPN usage more than doubled after the start of age check requirements, rising from roughly 650,000 daily users before July and peaking at over 1.4 million in mid-August.