When a site will not remove your leaked content
You sent a DMCA notice. The site did not answer, or it said no. This is common with leak sites. It is not the end. A site depends on other companies to stay online, and you can send your notice to them too.
Why does a site ignore a DMCA notice?
Some sites read every notice and act fast. Others do not. A leak site often:
- has no working contact address
- hides who owns it
- uses a host in a country with weak copyright rules
- earns money from each visit, so it wants to keep the page
A site that ignores you today can still act after its host or Google gets involved.
How long do you wait before you escalate?
Give the site a few days. Then send one short follow-up that refers to your first notice. If the site still does not answer about one week after your first notice, go to the next step.
Before each new step, open the page again. If the page is gone, you are done. Do not send more notices for a page that is already removed.
What is escalation?
Escalation means that you send your notice to the companies that keep the site online. Each of them has its own abuse desk.
| Who | What they do | What they can do |
|---|---|---|
| Host | The company that hosts the site (its servers) | Remove the file, or take the whole site offline |
| CDN, like Cloudflare | Sits in front of the site and speeds it up | Forward your notice to the host, and tell you who the host is |
| Registrar | The company that registered the name of the site | Suspend the domain name in serious cases |
| Search engines | Google and Bing | Remove the page from search results |
How do you find the host?
- Go to a WHOIS lookup, like ICANN Lookup.
- Enter the name of the site.
- Look at the registrar and the name servers.
- If the name servers belong to Cloudflare, the real host is hidden. See the next section.
- If not, search for the IP address of the site in a lookup tool. The result names the network owner. That is usually the host.
Find the abuse address of the host on its own site. It is often abuse@ plus the domain of the host. Our leak sites guide lists some common hosts.
What does Cloudflare do with your notice?
Many leak sites use Cloudflare. Cloudflare does not store the site itself, so it does not remove pages. When you send a copyright report through the Cloudflare abuse form:
- Cloudflare forwards your report to the host and to the owner of the site.
- Cloudflare tells you the name of the host.
Then send your notice directly to that host as well. Use the same text and the same page addresses.
Does the registrar help?
Sometimes. Many registrars do not act on copyright reports, because they do not store the content. Some registrars suspend a domain when a site ignores every notice, or when the site exists only to share copied content. Send a short report with your original notice and the dates that you sent it.
What else puts pressure on a site?
- Payment companies. If the site sells memberships or takes donations, report it to the payment company.
- Ad networks. If the site shows ads, report it to the ad network. Without ads, many leak sites earn nothing.
- File hosts. Leak sites often show videos that a file host stores. Remove the file from the file host, and the video stops on every site that links to it. See file hosts.
How do you remove the page from Google?
Removal from the site comes first. If the site does not remove the page, you can still stop most people from finding it.
- Send a copyright notice to Google for each page. See remove from Google.
- Do the same for Bing. See remove from Bing.
- Include the image addresses too, not only the page. Google Images checks each image address on its own.
Most people find leaked content through search. When the page is gone from Google, far fewer people see it, even if the site keeps it.
What if a site never complies?
Some sites never remove anything. They have no host that answers and no owner that anyone can find. For these sites:
- Keep the page out of Google and Bing.
- Keep a record of every notice, with the date and the answer.
- Remove the files from the file hosts that the site uses.
- Talk to a lawyer if the damage is large. A lawyer can sometimes find the owner through a court.
Keep records
Save a copy of each notice and each answer. A host or a lawyer will ask for them.
What does Unexpose do when a site does not answer?
On a paid plan, we do these steps for you:
- We send the DMCA notice to the site.
- If the site does not remove the page, we send a follow-up and then a warning.
- About one week after the first notice, we send the notice to the host.
- After about two weeks, we send it to the registrar.
- We also ask Google to remove the pages from search results.
Before each follow-up, we check the page again. We do not write to a site that already removed it. If the site answers, a person on our team reads the answer before the next step.
If every step fails, we tell you. We close the request, and we do not send more notices to that site. We still ask Google to remove the results.
You can see each step, with the date, on the page of the removal request. If you sell on a platform, see how we remove leaked OnlyFans content, remove leaked Fansly content, remove leaked Fanvue content and remove leaked Chaturbate recordings.
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