Ofcom Fines File-Sharing Service £20,000 for Non-Compliance

Ofcom News Centre

Filed December 17th, 2025

Detected February 7th, 2026

Summary

Ofcom has fined a file-sharing service £20,000 and imposed a daily penalty for failing to respond to legally binding information requests regarding child sexual abuse material. This action is part of Ofcom's enforcement of the UK's Online Safety Act.

View original document View source feed page

What changed

Ofcom has issued a £20,000 fine, along with a daily penalty of £100, to a file-sharing service for non-compliance with legally binding information requests under the UK's Online Safety Act. The service failed to provide requested information, including its illegal content risk assessment and qualifying worldwide revenue, which are crucial for Ofcom's oversight of measures to tackle child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

This enforcement action highlights the critical importance of timely and accurate responses to Ofcom's statutory information requests. Regulated entities must ensure they comply with all such requests to avoid penalties. Failure to provide the outstanding information by the specified deadline will result in continued daily penalties. This action underscores Ofcom's commitment to enforcing online safety duties and protecting users from illegal content.

Source document (simplified)

Enforcing the Online Safety Act: Ofcom fines file-sharing service £20,000

Share this page URL copied

Online safety Illegal and harmful content News and updates News Published:
17 December 2025
- Watchdog also confirms that porn company AVS has now introduced new age checks on all its sites under investigation, after Ofcom fine
Ofcom has today fined a file-sharing service £20,000 under the UK’s Online Safety Act for not responding to legally binding requests for information.

Tackling CSAM on file-sharing services

Earlier this year, new duties came into force requiring tech firms to assess the risk of people in the UK encountering illegal content on their platforms, and to assess how their service could be used to commit or facilitate certain criminal offences. Providers must take appropriate steps to reduce these risks.

When these duties came into effect, we immediately launched enforcement action to assess the safety measures being taken by file-sharing services, which are particularly susceptible to being exploited by offenders to distribute child sexual abuse material (CSAM) at scale. The spread of this material causes devastating harm to victims and remains one of the gravest online safety challenges.

As part of this enforcement work, we sent legally binding information requests to a number of these services regarding the measures they have in place to tackle CSAM, and requiring them to submit a record of their illegal content risk assessments to us.

In response to our enforcement action, some services have now deployed perceptual hash-matching technology – a powerful automated tool that can detect and swiftly remove CSAM before it spreads further, which is one of the core safety measures set out in our illegal harms codes of practice.

Other providers have taken steps to prevent people in the UK from accessing their sites. This has significantly reduced the likelihood that people in the UK will be exposed to illegal content on these services.

Fining providers who do not respond

Gathering accurate information from regulated companies is fundamental to our job of making life safer online for people in the UK. To assess and monitor industry compliance with their safety duties, we routinely issue formal information requests. Firms are required, by law, to respond to all such requests from Ofcom in an accurate, complete and timely way.

One file-sharing service under investigation has not provided the information requested in two statutory information requests, which included a copy of its illegal content risk assessment, and information relating to its qualifying worldwide revenue. As a result, Ofcom has fined this provider £20,000.

We will also impose a daily penalty of £100 per day, starting from tomorrow, for either 60 days or until the company provides us with this information, whichever is sooner.

Enforcement action secures positive outcomes

Ofcom has also today confirmed that AVS Group Ltd – which was recently fined £1 million by the regulator for not having robust age checks in place on 18 adult websites – has now introduced a new age assurance process on all sites that were the subject of our investigation.

We continue to monitor these sites to ensure that such processes are highly effective at preventing children from accessing pornographic content.

Suzanne Cater, Director of Enforcement at Ofcom, said: “Any company that fails to engage with Ofcom and their duties under the Online Safety Act should expect to face robust enforcement action.

“Porn sites must use highly effective age assurance to protect children. We've shown we'll use our enforcement powers to secure this outcome, and AVS has introduced new age checks after we fined them.”