Many women have been subjected to threats and blackmail from anonymous groups after sharing their personal information, photos and videos of private and intimate moments on the social media platform Reddit.
The BBC has unmasked a man from one such menacing group - and an old cigarette lighter served as a clue behind the mystery.
'Only five pounds for nudes - DM me.', 'I have some videos of her for sale too.', 'What do we want her to do?', reading these comments and chats online. And the pictures made me feel sick.
There are thousands of such pictures of women online. Endless collection of full nude and half nude women photos. And beneath these pictures are men's lewd and lascivious comments about women - even threats of rape. These comments are so vulgar and open that it is impossible to share them here.
A friend of mine first brought the news of this world to my attention. A picture of him was taken from Instagram and posted on the Reddit platform. It was not a nude picture of her. However, the photo was accompanied by sexually suggestive and vulgar comments. The woman expressed concerns to me about herself and other women.
After searching I found a market. There are hundreds of photos of unidentified women and information about them. They are provided for sharing, merchandising and selling their nude and intimate photos. And all practically without the permission of these women.
Doxing
The market appears to be a new evolution of so-called revenge porn, where images of women's private sex lives are published online without consent. And in most cases it is women's ex-spouses who act as bitter expressions of their broken relationships.
Not only are these intimate pictures being shared with thousands of people, but some men are threatening and blackmailing these women to reveal their true identity by conspiring behind the mask of hiding their identity. What is known in the cyber world as 'doxing'.
Thus their address, phone number and contact handle on social media Twitter is being spread to others online. The women are then subjected to lewd sexual comments and are threatened and blackmailed.
Seeing all this, it seemed that I had suddenly entered a very dark corner of the Internet. But, no - all this is happening on a major social media platform.
Social platform Reddit
This platform Reddit describes itself as the 'front page of the Internet'. They have around five million daily followers worldwide, including around 4 million users in the UK.
Reddit allows certain individuals to run forums, called 'subreddits'. These forums cover a wide variety of topics and interests. But most of them are not that harmful.
However, the Reddit platform has a history of hosting controversial sexual content. In 2014, the site caught a case of sharing private photos of various stars. And four years later, Reddit banned a group from their platform for using 'deepfake' technology.
This 'deepfake' technology is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) technology capable of creating 'extremely fake' things. Using this technology, the group was making porn videos with images of celebrities.
In response to the controversy, the American company tightened its rules, and enforced laws prohibiting the publication or threat of publication of intimate or nude images of anyone without consent and any material of overt sexuality on its site.
So I try to understand how nude and intimate pictures of women are still being shared on the reddit platform and what effect it has on those whose pictures are being published. I am trying to find out who is behind the publication of these pictures.
South Asian women
I can clearly see that the ban issued by reddit is not working. Our search revealed dozens of 'subreddits', or sites outside of the main Reddit platform, sharing intimate images of women from around the UK.
The first site I look at is targeted at South Asian women. The group had more than 20,000 users, mostly men from the same community. They have commented in English, Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi.
Some of these women I know, because they have a huge fan following on social media. I knew some of them personally. In all there were 15 thousand pictures. Out of the 1,000 images we see in it, 150 different women are naked.
The comments on all the pictures portray them as sex objects and portray them as inferior women. I was sure that none of these women had given permission to have their pictures published on this forum.
The Reddit screen grab below shows the kind of comments the women posted about the unauthorized photos - with one user even threatening to rape the woman. Another user says he has more than 500 photos of the woman.
Some of the pictures on these sites are social of these women, like the one my girlfriend found on this site Collected from medium and all nude or intimate of no moment. But these images are still accompanied by comments belittling the women, defaming them and sometimes hacking into their phones and computers to get nude photos of them.
When contacted, one such woman said she has been receiving intimate and sexual messages "every day" since a group collected a photo of her in a skimpy outfit from Instagram and posted it - even suggesting she would be raped.
Men are sharing and selling nude photos of women on subreddit sites. These pictures appear to be selfies and may have been taken with the aim of sending them to spouses or male friends. They were not taken for mass distribution.
These sites also feature videos that are more revealing - purporting to be photos of these women secretly having sex.
"I'll Find You"
One post included a bunch of messages with a picture of a naked woman having oral sex. An anonymous user asked, 'Is there a video of this (of this sex)?', along with a disrespectful name for the woman.
Another wrote: 'I have a whole folder full of photos of this woman - £5. Contact.' A third person asked, 'What is his social status?'
Ayesha - not her real name - learned last year that her videos were being shared on the subreddit platform. She believes her ex-boyfriend secretly took this photo. Not only has she had to deal with issues of breach of trust, she has also faced harassment and threats on social media for posting her personal information on the forum.
If you don't have sex with me, I will send this picture to your parents. I will come, I will find you... If you don't agree to have sex with me, I will rape you.' The man who blackmailed her tried to intimidate her and threatened 'I will leak more such pictures'.
He said, 'I am a Pakistani girl. Having sex before marriage or doing anything like that is absolutely not acceptable in our society.
Ayesha then stopped socializing and even leaving the house. Finally tried to commit suicide. After a failed suicide attempt, parents have to tell their parents what happened. Ayesha said that both her parents became mentally ill.
'There was no place for me to show my shame about everything and putting them in this situation.'
Ayesha tried to contact Reddit several times. In one incident the video was removed almost immediately, but in another it took four months to be removed. And that's not the end of the story. The video, which was eventually removed, has since been shared on other social media and reappeared on the original subreddit site a month later.
The subreddit site where Ayesha was harassed was created and run by a man who identified himself as 'zippomad'. And it was through this name that the BBC was able to find that person.
Business of nude and sex pictures
Since zippomad is the moderator of the group, it is his responsibility to ensure that his subreddit discussions follow the group reddit rules. But he did the opposite by not doing that at all.
After finding his subreddit group, I saw that he reopened the group three times after reddit shut down his group after receiving complaints. In each of the new versions he used the original name with slight modifications. Each of his group names bears the mark of apartheid—names that cannot be pronounced. He has posted similar content in each version and has thousands of active followers each.
The trade in nude photos has become so widespread that online harassment and abuse experts have given it a name - collector culture.
Clare McGlynn, a law professor at Durham University in Britain, is an expert on this type of online harassment. He says: "They are not the work of a depraved mind or a freak or a man of perverted taste. The numbers are huge - thousands of people are involved in this kind of behavior."
Nudity and sexually explicit images are traded in private chat rooms on online messaging apps or websites. Thousands of men flocked there, says Professor McGlynn.
Many men, he says, want to raise their profile in this group by building up huge collections of such non-consensual photos. Their addiction to collecting such pictures and videos is so strong that it is difficult to stop them completely. The same was seen in the case of Ayesha. He saw his removed videos reappear on the website from other people's collections.
"Reddit is not sincere"
Seven women who tried to get their photos removed from Reddit told me they didn't feel like the company was serious about helping them. Four people said Reddit never removed this content. It took a long eight months for someone to pick up the content.
Reddit told us at the Panorama event that it had removed more than 88,000 sex images posted without permission last year and said it takes such matters "very seriously".
Reddit says it has automated tools to find and remove photos of intimate moments shared without permission, and a team of
