Hundreds of innocent-looking apps on the App Store and Google Play were secret AI nudify tools

A pet portrait maker, a hair salon tool and a language tutor look harmless in Apple’s and Google’s app stores. According to a report published on Monday by the nonprofit AI Forensics, hundreds of apps like these were fronts for a single operation selling AI “nudify” tools, which turn photos of real people into explicit images and videos without their consent, promoted by tens of thousands of pornographic ads on Facebook and Instagram.

The researchers identified 444 apps, published under seemingly unrelated developer names. Since January 1, they counted more than 84,000 ads on Meta matching the network’s pattern, paid for under “plainly fictitious payer names such as ‘123456’”.

How the apps switch on

The trick is a gate in the code. AI Forensics downloaded one of the apps, Prilos, straight from Google Play and found only an AI hair salon and outfit-change app. A user who arrives from a Meta ad gets something else: the app loads a webpage inside itself with “over a thousand ready-made templates” for explicit images and videos made from any uploaded photo. Among them, the report says, are templates called “Bedroom Rape” and “Lock Her Up”.

Paul Bouchaud, the AI Forensics researcher who reverse engineered the apps, told Wired that each install tells a server where the user came from, and the server decides which version to show. Wired, which investigated alongside the report, found the same set-up behind Viefur, a “pet portrait” app on Apple’s App Store.

The operation runs on mainstream AI: Prilos used ByteDance’s Seedream model through Together AI, and its code mentions Tencent, Shengshu Technology’s Vidu and ClothOff, a nudify service. AI Forensics works out that an image costs the developer $0.035 and the user up to $3.20.

One slip exposed 444 apps

Google Play makes every app link a privacy policy on the open web. The apps’ homepages showed only a black screen, but behind each sat a JavaScript bundle holding a table of the whole portfolio: every app’s package name, domain, API encryption key and Meta Pixel ID. In effect, each site gave away all the others.

Those lists led to the 444 apps, 46% apparently built for Apple’s App Store. As of September 11, 27 were still live on Google Play, 20 of them rated PEGI 3 (suitable for all ages), with more than 352,000 downloads between them, and 21 were on the App Store. The most popular, DiffAi, had more than 105,000 downloads. Maël Le Touz, a researcher at security firm Infoblox, separately found almost 500 linked domains, Wired reports.

“So far it hasn’t”

Bouchaud told Wired the operators are betting on platforms being too slow:

This is an organized, commercially run operation: One operator behind hundreds of disposable apps and domains, cloaked to pass App Store review and pushed through tens of thousands of Meta ads under fake payer names. They don’t expect enforcement to catch up, and so far it hasn’t.

Paul Bouchaud, lead researcher, AI Forensics, to Wired

Wired traced the apps to Chinese-language developers and a Hong Kong-registered company, KeLing Technology Limited, whose name appeared in the contact details of the network’s first website and on an admin login page. KeLing didn’t respond to Wired.

What Apple, Google and Meta say

Apple removed 19 apps, including Viefur, after Wired shared the domains. Spokesperson Adam Dema said the apps “complied with our rules when we reviewed them”, but their developers later changed the website the apps pull content from and “promoted it through pornographic ads hosted on a third-party platform.” Apple’s October rewrite of the App Store rules now bans apps that hide features until after review.

Google had already removed most of the apps before Wired contacted it, and didn’t comment. Meta told Wired it banned KeLing from advertising in 2025 and has since acted against 11,600 ad accounts and 15,000 pages linked to the domains, and blocked 209 apps from advertising. In October Meta said it now uses a large language model to catch disguised ads.

Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, which flagged nudify apps in Meta’s ads in January, said the ads break “not just one, but several of Meta’s policies”:

There is no question about what you are seeing, what the app is advertising.

Katie Paul, director, Tech Transparency Project, to Wired

Why it matters

Apple, Google and Meta all review apps and ads before they go live, yet one operator kept nudify tools in both big app stores and Meta’s ads for most of a year by showing reviewers a different app. The EU’s ban on AI nudifier systems, approved by the European Parliament, gives companies until December 2, 2026 to comply, and making a sexual deepfake of an adult without consent is already a crime in England and Wales.

Sources: AI Forensics, “Advertised by Design: Nudify Apps on Meta, Google Play and the App Store”; Wired; European Parliament.