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Ofcom fines porn company £1 million for not having robust age checks

ended 04. December 2025

Ofcom has today fined AVS Group Ltd – which runs 18 adult websites – £1 million for not having robust age checks in place, plus £50,000 for failing to respond to information requests. Under the UK’s Online Safety Act, sites that host pornographic material must use highly effective age assurance to prevent children from readily accessing that content. Within days of this duty coming into force in July, Ofcom launched investigations into the providers of dozens of adult sites, including AVS Group Ltd. With millions of monthly UK visitors, these websites were prioritised based on their user numbers and the risk of harm they posed. While AVS has implemented what it refers to as age verification, Ofcom did not consider it to be highly effective, and have fined the company £1,000,000. AVS must now implement highly effective age assurance within 72 hours of today’s decision, or face a daily penalty of £1,000 per day. Today’s fines come as the regulator reports on how the online safety landscape is changing, following new UK laws coming into effect this year.

  • What are your thoughts on the key issue of online safety?
  • Are we doing enough to protect children and the vulnerable?
  • And what about the big tech companies? Are they meeting the standards that are expected of them?
  • And could the advent of AI make it more easy for children to be exposed to pornographic material (a cuddly bear in the US was recently removed from shelves for discussing BDSM)?

Any thoughts or insights, send them across.

3 responses from the Newspage community

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Colette Mason
AI Ethics Consultant at Clever Clogs AI
Finally, the regulator has bitten back. The £1m fine for AVS Group exposes the industry's reliance on flimsy checks masquerading as a safety system,. It isn't. It’s a liability, as their hefty fines confirm.

Are we doing enough? No. For too long, companies have treated child safety as a tick-box exercise. AVS tried to pass off basic photo uploads as "highly effective" verification, but without live likeness checks, it was vulnerable to circumvention by children simply uploading pictures of an adult. Big Tech is on notice: Ofcom isn't buying these digital responsibility shrugs anymore.

As for AI, it’s pouring petrol on the fire. It doesn't just host harmful content; it creates it without needing a check. From "nudification" apps generating abuse material to chatbots forming unhealthy attachments with children, AI introduces interactive risks that static filters miss,. We need robust safety systems designed for human reality, not just black boxes that hope for the best.
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Patricia McGirr
Founder at Repossession Rescue Network
Ofcom’s fine exposes a simple truth. Children can access hardcore content faster than regulators can write a press release, and some sites still treat age checks as a nice-to-have. Big tech talks safety while designing systems that reward engagement, not protection. If they wanted to shut this down, they would.

AI makes the gap even wider. If a toy can wander into BDSM chat, imagine what an unfiltered model can serve a child in seconds.

Online safety risks becoming the second class citizen of an industry chasing profit over people. Regulators can’t keep pace with the changes. Doing their job is fine, but we need pressure at the point of launch, not after the damage is done.
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Rohit Parmar-Mistry
Founder at Pattrn Data
This fine is security theatre at its finest. The Online Safety Act is an analogue law failing in a digital world.

We are demanding 'robust' age checks that force adults to hand over passports to third-party vendors, creating massive data honeypots for hackers. We’ve already seen the danger: Discord recently confirmed a breach exposing 70,000 government IDs used for age verification. If tech giants can’t secure this data, why trust anyone else? We are trading privacy for a false sense of security.

Meanwhile, any tech-savvy teenager can bypass these checks in seconds using a VPN. The 'digital border' is a joke. And where is this energy for the platforms kids actually use? Roblox is rampant with grooming risks, yet because it’s a 'game', it escapes the same regulatory fury.

We are obsessing over blocking adult sites while ignoring the 'cuddly' platforms where kids are actually exposed to harm. This Act is a plaster on a gaping wound.