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LONDON — The United Kingdom’s digital regulator, Ofcom, has imposed another substantial fine on an online adult entertainment platform, saying it failed to meet the country’s age verification requirements.
The operator of the media-sharing website Fapello.com has been fined £630,000, or roughly $850,000 based on current exchange rates. In announcing the penalty Thursday, the regulator said the fine stemmed from “not having age checks in place, and … for failing to respond to a legally binding information request on time.”
“Robust age checks are a cornerstone of the U.K.’s Online Safety Act,” the agency said. “Sites that host pornographic material must use ‘highly effective’ age assurance to determine whether a particular user is over 18, in order to prevent children from readily accessing that content.”
The regulator imposed a £600,000 fine for failing to comply with the age assurance requirements, along with an additional £30,000 penalty for not responding to official information requests within the required timeframe.
“Age checks are no longer optional for porn sites in the U.K.,” said George Lusty, the regulator’s director of enforcement. “They are a cornerstone of our laws to protect children from content they should not be seeing.”
The regulator also announced Thursday that it has opened an investigation into the operators of Eporner.com. The platform is operated by parent company Bit Hive, a shell company linked to the owners of a business based in Germany and Poland.
“Our investigation will examine whether there are reasonable grounds to believe that Bit Hive has failed, or is failing, to comply with the section 12 duties under the Online Safety Act 2023 (‘the Act’), which requires providers to prevent children from encountering pornographic content by implementing highly effective age assurance,” the regulator said in its notice.
The investigation into Eporner.com remains ongoing.
