Porn production company BangBros put a stop to PornWikiLeaks by buying the site and setting fire to the leaked personal data.
PornWikiLeaks was set up with the intention of revealing personal information about porn stars, including real names, phone numbers, addresses and even names of family members.
It’s unclear when the site was first established but last week it went blank, its homepage replaced with a letter from BangBros and a link to a YouTube video.
Watch it below:
The porn company explained PornWikiLeaks had been ‘a resource for hate, lies, and sensitive information’, so they purchased the site ‘with the intention of shutting it down and removing all information associated with it’.
They said over 15,000 performers had their real names listed on the site after the information was stolen from them.
The letter added:
There’s no catch. No hidden thing to getting your personal stuff off of it. We simply didn’t want it out there for the world to see anymore.
A forum that had 300,000 posts on it, most of them negative and hate-filled, has now disappeared.
If you had anything ever posted on here, it will be removed and deleted forever from here. As well as BangBros nows owns the domain. Nothing will ever be up here besides this page that you see now. So you don’t have to worry about it coming back either.
On YouTube, the company explained they ‘decided to have a little fun with the data so nobody would ever have to worry again in the future.’ The video, titled ‘All The PornWikiLeaks Data’ showed a pile of computer hard-drives labelled ‘PornWikiLeaks’ being covered in lighter fluid and set on fire.
A BangBros spokesman confirmed news of the stunt to Adult Video Network last week, saying:
Today we took possession of all their hard-drives full of sensitive and personal information. And now we are disposing of them.
According to Business Insider, Swedish erotic film director Erika Lust described PornWikiLeaks as ‘a disgusting website that endangered so many performers and other people working in the industry’. She added the BangBros stunt was ‘a sign of solidarity with an industry that is stigmatized and heavily mistreated by society and media outlets’.
It’s unclear who owned PornWikiLeaks and how much BangBros paid for the site and its data but the porn production company said they hope their decision ‘make[s] the internet a little bit better’ for those involved in the porn industry.
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Emily Brown first began delivering important news stories aged just 13, when she launched her career with a paper round. She graduated with a BA Hons in English Language in the Media from Lancaster University, and went on to become a freelance writer and blogger. Emily contributed to The Sunday Times Travel Magazine and Student Problems before becoming a journalist at UNILAD, where she works on breaking news as well as longer form features.