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An online ad for Ben McAdams, the Democratic candidate for Congress in Utah, emphasised that he could be trusted because he “fought back against MAGA”.

In Texas, another ad promoted Republican candidate Chris Gober, calling him a “MAGA warrior”.

What’s interesting is that both ads were ultimately paid for with money from the same organisation – Leading the Future (LTF), a Super PAC which opposes regulations that “constrain” innovation in AI. The network has received US$125 million in funding in total from OpenAI president Greg Brockman, his wife Anna Brockman, tech-focused venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and a16z’s founders, Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings show. 

Directly opposing LTF is Public First Action (PFA), which calls for AI safety regulations and guardrails. PFA has received $40 million in funding from AI company Anthropic. 

Like the ads run by organisations funded by LTF, the Super PACs funded by PFA also ran ads that appeared supportive or critical of Trump depending on the voters they were targeting. 

None of these ads mentions AI.

As the US 2026 midterm elections approach on Nov. 3, Super PAC spending on political advertising has reportedly soared to record highs, surpassing US$11 billion last week and exceeding the amount spent on any other election cycle to date. 

Super PACs are a particular type of political action committee (PAC) that may receive unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations, labour unions and other PACs for the purpose of financing independent expenditures and other independent political activity.

In this year’s elections, LTF’s and PFA’s Super PACs, funded by the AI industry heavyweights, have played an outsized role in supporting or opposing candidates through advertising. But as polls show distrust of AI crosses party lines, the advertisements that Silicon Valley’s leaders are paying millions of dollars to try to sway the results in their chosen candidates’ favour often do not mention AI at all. 

While LTF is a registered Super PAC itself, FEC filings show it mainly disburses money to other Super PACs in its network which run political ads. 

Of about $52 million that LTF has disbursed to date, $20 million went to Think Big, which targets the Democratic voter base, and another $20 million went to American Mission, which focuses on Republicans. 

PFA, meanwhile, is registered as a “social welfare”, or 501(c)(4), organisation. This type of non-profit is not required to disclose its donors or disbursements. However, PFA contributes funds to three Super PACs: the bipartisan Public First PAC, Jobs and Democracy for Democratic candidates and Defending Our Values for Republicans. FEC filings for these Super PACs show Public First PAC received $1 million, Jobs and Democracy received $15.4 million and Defending Our Values received $7.9 million from PFA. Public First PAC’s FEC filings also show that $4 million of its $4.4 million in disbursements disclosed so far went to Jobs and Democracy, while another $300,000 went to Defending Our Values. 

Super PACs are allowed to accept unlimited contributions from other political committees, and other similar networks of Super PACs have been observed in the current election cycle, such as cryptocurrency-linked Fairshake and its affiliated Super PACs.

Bellingcat analysed data on more than 300 online video ad campaigns paid for by Think Big, American Mission, Jobs and Democracy and Defending Our Values from Google’s Ad Transparency Center. These ad campaigns, many of which used the same videos in slightly different formats or across different platforms, supported or opposed 40 candidates. 

Only ads supporting or opposing two candidates mentioned AI, and none mentioned data centres, a top issue this election cycle. A New York Times analysis of 95 video ads paid for by the same four Super PACs, using data gathered by media tracking firm AdImpact, had similar findings. FEC rules state that Super PACs can spend money to support or oppose a candidate, but cannot coordinate with the candidate or their campaign on this. There is no evidence that any of the candidates or campaigns for which the Super PACs ran ads have coordinated with them.

Michael Beckel, Director of Money in Politics Reform at cross-partisan political reform group Issue One, told Bellingcat that voters are at a disadvantage when special interests fund Super PACs running ads that don’t mention the priority issues of those underwriting them. 

“Special interests seem keen on moving voters with messaging around hot-button issues, all while advancing a specific policy agenda that viewers of ads are kept in the dark about,” he said. The result of this, Beckel added, was that “the industry gains a stronger hand in Washington, while voters get little chance to judge the agenda their votes could help advance”. 

A representative for PFA stated: “We endorse officials who support regulating AI. The aligned PACs run ads on the issues that matter most immediately to voters in each race, and for most electorates right now that means the economy, affordability, public safety, and other issues that they are facing on a daily basis.” 

Jobs and Democracy, Defending Our Values, LTF, Think Big and American Mission did not respond to questions about their political advertising as of publication. 

A recent survey by think tank Data for Action and non-profit Guardrails Action found that about three-quarters of likely voters would be less inclined to vote for a candidate if they found out they had accepted a donation from an AI Super PAC. 

The ads distributed by the AI-backed Super PACs supporting or opposing 29 candidates mentioned economic issues such as taxes, the cost of living, consumer rights and local jobs or small businesses. Another 16 mentioned immigration or law enforcement and 17 mentioned US President Donald Trump or his “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement. 

Like the ads mentioning Trump, those on immigration were sharply divided in messaging depending on whether they were targeting Democratic or Republican voters, even when they were paid for by the AI Super PACs in the same network. 

LTF’s Think Big sponsored an ad for Democratic candidate Jeremy Moss in Michigan that talks about how he stood up to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), while American Mission’s ad for Republican Clay Fuller in Georgia mentions how he is focused on securing the southern border. 

We found similar messaging in ads mentioning immigration that were paid for by Super PACs in PFA’s network. Defending Our Values ran an ad in support of Republican John Cowan in Georgia emphasising that he will combat illegal immigration, whereas Jobs and Democracy’s ad for Democrat Valerie Foushee in North Carolina said she was “leading the fight to hold ICE accountable”.

For the ads that did mention AI, almost all were in support of Alex Bores’ primary in New York. PFA’s Jobs and Democracy PAC ran 152 ads supporting Bores’ candidacy, at least some of which mentioned that he was in favour of safeguards on AI and holding Big Tech accountable. 

LTF’s Think Big, on the other hand, ran 22 ads opposing Bores’ candidacy. While they did not mention his stance on AI, many of Think Big’s ads focused on him receiving funding from Anthropic, “dark money Super PACs” and his former employer Palantir, the software giant whose technology, including a new AI system, is used in ICE’s immigration enforcement operations. 

Jobs and Democracy’s advertiser page also showed two ads for Josh Gottheimer in New Jersey that focused on the threats of AI scams and AI-generated media, urging voters to call Gottheimer to tell him to “stand strong for AI safeguards”. 

Major donors to LTF that Bellingcat reached out to – Greg Brockman, a16z, and a16z founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz – did not respond to requests for comment on their funding to the Super PACs as of publication. We could not find any publicly available contact information for Anna Brockman, but we also asked about her contributions to LTF in questions to her husband.

OpenAI did not respond to questions about the Brockmans’ contributions to LTF as of publication. However, the company published a statement on the topic in June, which said “OpenAI does not direct the activities of LTF, or have visibility into their operations” and that “any engagement with that organisation has been in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the company”. 

PFA’s main public donor, Anthropic, did not respond to Bellingcat’s queries about its funding for PFA and PFA’s political advertising as of publication. It said in a statement on its website in July that its donations to PFA were “to help promote policies that will maintain meaningful safeguards, sustain America’s AI leadership, and demand transparency from the companies building the most powerful AI models”.

Unknown Vendors

Federal campaign finance laws require federal political committees to file periodic campaign finance reports disclosing their receipts and disbursements. 

Our analysis of FEC filings for LTF and the Super PACs in its network revealed that they were channelling more than $36.4 million in total towards four companies that were newly set up, with no apparent online presence outside of these filings. 

A complaint to the FEC by the non-profit Campaign Legal Center (CLC) in May cited American Mission and Think Big’s payments to Summit Ridge and Lantern Productions, alleging that the Super PACs had “unlawfully evaded federal reporting requirements by funnelling their payments for goods and services through shell companies set up to conceal how the super PACs are actually spending their money”. The FEC has not yet ruled on the complaint. LTF, American and Think Big did not respond to Bellingcat’s queries about the complaint as of publication.

FEC filings show that LTF paid a company called Prusik Partners LLC more than $966,000 for operational expenditures for a range of services including communications and strategy consulting, as well as legal fees. 

The network’s Democrat-focused Super PAC, Think Big, paid a company called Lantern Production Consultants LLC more than $20 million, based on filings for disbursements from Aug. 20, 2025 to Oct. 14, 2026. 

The payments included $3.17 million for operational expenditures for a range of services such as media consulting and research, and another $17 million for independent expenditures. The FEC defines an independent expenditure as one that pays for “a communication that expressly advocates for the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate”. The highest independent expenditures paid to Lantern ($8 million) were to oppose Bores’ candidacy, the filings show.

Think Big also declared in its filings that it had paid a company called Blue Horizon Compliance Consultants LLC almost $55,700 for “compliance consulting”. 

Republican-focused American Mission, on the other hand, paid a company called Summit Ridge Media LLC more than $13 million, based on filings for disbursements from Aug. 20, 2025 to Oct. 14, 2026. 

This included $2.2 million for operating expenditures such as polling and website services, and $10.9 million in independent expenditures, with the highest amount (about $960,400) going towards communications in support of James Morris Kingston, the Republican candidate for the House of Representatives in Georgia.

Bellingcat found that all four of these LLCs listed mailing offices and office supply goods stores in Nevada as their mailing addresses. We could not find records of them doing business with any entity outside of the LTF network – in fact, they appeared to have no online presence aside from their names appearing in the filings and business registrations. 

Despite their addresses being listed in Nevada, none of the companies could be found in the state’s public business registry. Instead, Bellingcat found registrations for Prusik, Lantern Production and Summit Ridge across the country – in Delaware. 

While Delaware is the second-smallest state in the US, more than half of all Fortune 500 companies are incorporated there according to the Delaware Secretary of State. The state’s business-friendly laws mean companies can reportedly incorporate in minutes and are only required to name a representative – who can be a paid agent unrelated to the business – in public registration documents, not the beneficial owners.

Articles of incorporation from the Delaware Secretary of State showed that Prusik was registered on July 22, 2025, while Lantern Production and Summit Ridge were both registered on Oct. 30, 2025. We also found a Delaware registration for a company called “Blue Horizon Compliance Group LLC”, registered on Oct. 30, 2025. While the name differs slightly from the Blue Horizon Compliance Consultants LLC that Think Big declared payments for, the registration was signed by the same agent listed in the documents for Lantern Production and Summit Ridge. 

The filings show that all of these companies – including Blue Horizon Compliance Group, if this was indeed the same entity referred to in Think Big’s filings – began receiving payments from the Super PACs within two to three months of their business registrations.

Saurav Ghosh, CLC’s Director of Federal Campaign Finance Reform, told Bellingcat that the group filed the complaint because “when groups funded by big corporate special interests evade transparency laws, voters lose”. 

“Federal reporting requirements help ensure transparency in our elections and protect voters’ legal right to know where the money is going,” Ghosh said. “Secret spending schemes like this make it virtually impossible to ensure that our elected officials are staying accountable to voters instead of wealthy special interests.”

We were unable to reach out to the LLCs as none of them had phone numbers or email addresses listed online. LTF, Think Big, and American Mission did not respond to questions about the LLCs, including whether “Blue Horizon Compliance Consultants LLC” listed in Think Big’s filings was the same company as Delaware-registered “Blue Horizon Compliance Group LLC”. However, a WIRED story on these same LLCs quoted a spokesperson from LTF as saying that the complaint was “a desperate ploy for attention from Public First, Anthropic, and the groups aligned with their outside organisations”. WIRED also quoted a Public First spokesperson denying that the group had anything to do with the complaint.  

Beckel suggested that stricter transparency measures relating to Super PAC spending would help inform and empower voters. For instance, Congress could pass legislation to require ads to include the names of the top donors, he said, adding that similar rules had been passed with cross-partisan support in places like Alaska and Arizona. 

“Congress would be doing voters a huge service by passing more robust transparency requirements for political ads. Voters deserve to know who is behind the ads they’re seeing,” Beckel said. 

About the Data

Google Ads Analysis

We reviewed ads available through Google’s Ads Transparency Center. These are ads served on Google platforms like Search, Display, Gmail and YouTube. We filtered specifically for ads shown between Jan. 1 and Oct. 23, 2026 in the US. 

We focused only on video ads classified as political advertisements, not text- or image-based ads. We looked at ads purchased by the following advertisers: Think Big, THINK BIG, American Mission, Jobs and Democracy PAC, JOBS AND DEMOCRACY PAC, Defending Our Values PAC and DEFENDING OUR VALUES PAC. 

In total, there were 336 advertisements in the dataset: 86 from Think Big, 57 from American Mission, 22 from Defending Our Values and 171 from Jobs and Democracy. Each ad listed on the platform was counted individually, although many of these were duplicates of the same ad that was run over a different period or platform. Some of the ads have also been removed for ad policy violations, but we were able to see which candidates they were for because they appeared when searching for ads specific to those candidates within the advertiser’s page. 

For the coding of themes, we looked at whether each of the themes mentioned (AI, data centres, economy, Trump, and immigration or law enforcement) appeared in any of the ads for each candidate. This does not account for how many times each theme may have appeared in ads for a candidate.

Our notes on the Google ad data and count of themes for each candidate can be found here. 

For the accompanying map showing spending by each Super PAC by state, we used data from the Google Ad Transparency Center showing the total spend per advertiser and the spending range per ad to estimate the spend per ad (as the data does not show the exact spend per ad). For each advertiser, we separately added up the minimum and maximum spend amounts for all ads. We then calculated where in that range the total spend fell (e.g. 45 percent between the minimum and maximum spend). The per ad spend was estimated by applying this same proportion to the range of each ad and rounding down to the nearest dollar.

FEC Campaign Finance Data

Data from FEC filings for LTF, Think Big and American Mission are based on disclosures from Aug. 20, 2025 to Oct. 14, 2026. Data from FEC filings for Public First, Defending Our Values and Jobs and Democracy are based on disclosures for Jan. 1, 2026 to Sept. 30, 2026, which were the latest available as of publication.

The amounts LTF and PFA contributed to their associated Super PACs are based on the recipient Super PACs’ receipts for contributions from “Leading the Future”, “Public First”, “Public First Action” and “Public First Action, Inc”. 

Links to the source pages for these filings, as well as the data we exported for our analysis, are available here.

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This investigation was supported by a grant from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism. 

Data visualisations by Galen Reich. Melissa Zhu contributed research to this piece.

Bellingcat is a non-profit and the ability to carry out our work is dependent on the kind support of individual donors. If you would like to support our work, you can do so here. You can also subscribe to our Newsletter and follow us on Bluesky here, Instagram here, Reddit here and YouTube here.

The post Inside the Secretive, Contradictory World of Campaign Ads Funded by AI Super PACs appeared first on bellingcat.

This investigation is a collaboration between Bellingcat and New Zealand news site The Press. You can read The Press’ piece here. 

Content warning: This article discusses non-consensual sexually explicit content and child sexual abuse material.

In 2024, a former track and field coach in Boston, Massachusetts, was sentenced to five years in jail for attempting to trick and extort more than 100 women, including student-athletes he coached, into sending him intimate photos. 

According to the 2021 criminal complaint, Steve Waithe stole photos from some of the student-athletes’ phones under the pretence of “filming their form” at practices and meets. He also approached some victims via fake online accounts, telling them he had found their images on a forum site called “leakedbb.com” (“LeakedBB”) and offering to help them remove these photos if they provided more images for “reference”. 

Authorities said Waithe also hired and paid another man in October 2020 to hack into the Snapchat accounts of women he coached or had other relationships with in an effort to steal and distribute nude images online. 

In one post, according to the US Attorney’s Office, Waithe wrote: “Does anyone want to trade nudes? I’m talking girls you actually know. Could be exes or whatever. I have quite a few and [am] down to trade over snap[chat] or something.” 

Legal documents do not name the sites on which Waithe distributed these images, but Bellingcat found a cached version of a November 2020 post with that exact wording on LeakedBB – the same site he allegedly used to try to trick victims. Another cached LeakedBB thread posted a few months later shows the same user offering to trade nudes of athletes, including “a lot that I actually know”.

Such posts were not unusual on the site: multiple archived pages show the forum’s users either requesting Snapchat hacks or offering to help others hack Snapchat accounts, sometimes for a fee. 

In the criminal case against Waithe, the ownership of LeakedBB is never discussed, but a Bellingcat investigation can reveal that payment streams, company records and website domain information appear to lead back to one individual: Jitendra Maharaj, a Christchurch-based former pilot and co-founder of a cryptocurrency start-up, Pay It Now (PIN), which reportedly billed itself as the “Stripe of crypto payments”. 

Our New Zealand publishing partner The Press sent an email to Maharaj on June 4 outlining our findings in detail and inviting him to respond. Maharaj did not reply to this. 

However, by June 6, LeakedBB was down. As of publication, the website remains inaccessible. 

The Press later received an email from a Christchurch-based lawyer representing Maharaj, who said their client was in Fiji for a family member’s funeral. The lawyer requested that we wait until his return on June 23. 

When The Press visited his residence – a two-storey family home in Christchurch’s affluent Aidanfield suburb – on June 25, Maharaj said he did not know who was behind LeakedBB or operated it and that he was not sure if the website was down. 

He said he did not respond to the email queries and had not spoken to his lawyers about them because “all the evidence against me just sounded really weird” and it seemed like there was “some kind of targeted attack out on me” based on “manufactured evidence or something that’s pointing me to this garbage”. However, he refused to comment on the record about most of the specific evidence linking him to the site and referred these questions to his lawyer. 

He also claimed that he had been contacted by people “trying to harass me to get me to send them money”, but declined to provide details on the record.

Despite a further extension of the deadline until July 6 – more than a month after we first reached out – Maharaj and his lawyer had not provided any statement directly addressing the specific evidence linking him to the site as of publication. 

PIN, the company Maharaj co-founded, did not respond to The Press’ requests for comment. However, there is no suggestion that PIN has any knowledge of or involvement in LeakedBB.

Profiting Off ‘Leaks’

LeakedBB was set up in 2019 and built a sizeable following over the next seven years, averaging an estimated two million visits a month from March to May this year. The board statistics shown on LeakedBB’s homepage in May displayed 2.2 million registered users and more than 2.6 million posts.

Google’s Transparency Report shows it received more than 95,000 individual requests for over 350,000 pages on LeakedBB to be delisted from search results. This resulted in Google de-listing more than 169,000 pages from its search results, according to the report. 

Shortly after the site went offline, a Reddit post noting the outage and asking for alternatives trended in the “hot” section of a piracy subreddit, accumulating almost 700 votes in a week. In response to a question by one commenter asking what the site was, another person replied: “Not only did it have ‘onlyfans’ content, also amateur, asian, arabic, celebrity and other hacked phone/icloud content from other sites.”

This comment accurately summarised some of the content on the site. In LeakedBB’s early days, it had sections for other types of “leaked” content such as computer programmes and eBooks. But within months, the forum’s discussions were almost exclusively about pornographic images and videos that members claimed had been leaked – implying that it was non-consensual, hacked or stolen content.

The most popular section on the forum contained content that claimed to be from sites such as OnlyFans and Fansly, which, if shared without the original creators’ consent, would be a violation of their intellectual property. 

Reba Rocket, co-owner and chief operating officer of Takedown Piracy, a company that helps both adult performers and private individuals remove non-consensually shared explicit media, said sites like LeakedBB cause financial harm to legitimate content creators.

“People would not shove a DVD into their coat pocket and walk out of the store – that’s something tangible that they know they’re doing something wrong, whereas watching something on the internet for free doesn’t have that same connected moral,” she said. 

Other sections on LeakedBB featured threads requesting or promoting content that often appeared to show women who did not have anything to do with the adult industry, which the posts claimed were leaked, hacked or even obtained through blackmail. 

One post advertised images of girls from 29 US states: “There’s names and Facebook information if you want that,” the member, “Master Leaker”, posted. “There’s also two girls that got blackmailed into sending more nudes as well!”

In the “Requests” section, users shared clothed images of women or social media handles of potential victims, and asked if others had leaked content of them. In one recent post looking for a “Florida Milf”, a user wrote: “She may go by the name [redacted]. Looks like the daughter graduated from [redacted]. Anyone have content of her? Sex tapes?” 

Some users also posted nude or intimate images of women they had found elsewhere, asking for help finding out their real identities. “Who is she?” or “Can anyone ID?” were some common questions in the posts. 

Non-consensual intimate image sharing (NCII), colloquially referred to as “revenge porn”, is far from new. It is a known problem on Reddit, where, in 2022, a BBC investigation found “thousands” of such images being shared despite the platform’s attempts to crack down on the issue. 

LeakedBB, however, seemed to take the opposite approach: instead of trying to moderate or prevent users from posting what appeared to be NCII, it sought to profit from and reward it. 

Except for preview images, most of the content users shared in the “leaks” section was behind a paywall and could only be accessed with memberships costing up to US$99.99 or by redeeming credits. 

The site rewarded members with credits for posting “leaked” content, as well as when other members spent credits to “unlock” their content. These credits could be used to access links that users could otherwise only view with a paid upgrade, or redeemed for cryptocurrency at varying rates (the most frequent contributors had the option to cash out the equivalent of up to $0.15 for each thread they posted). 

There was also an annual Christmas contest, with last year’s total prizes worth over $4,000 in cryptocurrency for users who posted or liked the most threads.

Rocket said LeakedBB had “damaged many people”, including clients of her company. “Those specific clients are not in the adult industry,” she said, “but LeakedBB seemed more than happy to share their non-consensual content”. 

The “leaks” were often posted with women’s purported real names, locations and social media accounts, as well as preview images showing their uncovered faces. One poster said sharing a woman’s social media details “adds to the experience”. 

“For me, it makes my jerk-off sesh feel more personal, as if she’s an actual person I know rather than a moviestar/pornstar,” the post said.

There were more than 80 responses to this thread, mostly thanking the original poster for sharing the content. One of them, however, claimed to be the woman shown in the images: “Please remove this link. These photos were illegally stolen from me. This constitutes revenge porn and violates US law. Police are already involved. Not only is it illegal but just gross.”

Allison Mahoney, the founder and managing attorney at ALM Law in New York and Colorado, told Bellingcat she received calls about cases involving NCII “all the time”. 

“It kind of amazes me, given the amount of media attention this has gotten over the years, that people are still engaging in this type of abuse so cavalierly,” said Mahoney, whose firm specialises in providing legal services for abuse survivors and children harmed in welfare systems.

Mahoney and Rocket agreed that sites sharing NCII often had real-world implications for victims, especially when images were posted alongside personal information, including names, contact information and professions. 

“We have clients who … their children were kicked out of Catholic school, or they lost their mainstream job, or relationships ended, or families cut them off simply because content was posted online without their consent and viewed by others,” Rocket said. 

Mahoney said online abuse can turn into offline abuse when victims have their personal information, like their name, profession and contact information, posted with their images.  She has seen clients who had strangers show up at their homes or places of work, threatening their physical safety – a situation she said was “really terrifying”. 

In July last year, LeakedBB closed a marketplace it had hosted for more than five years, which allowed users to sell leaks and services to each other. Lucifer NightStar, the administrator account on the site, said there were allegations of people selling “UA [underage] material”, which was “not something we want on [LeakedBB]”.

On one section of the forum, which was specifically for sharing content from other sites that hosted leaked pornographic content, LeakedBB had a disclaimer: “Please note that posting any content on any one below the legal age of 18 is against the law. We have a zero tolerance policy on such things and your account will immediately be banned / reported.”

But this warning did not appear on other sections of the forum, including those featuring threads of “amateur nudes” described as having been leaked. Some threads on the forum, which remained accessible shortly before the entire site was taken down, also described images of “young teens”. 

While it is not known if those descriptions are accurate, in a recent post on Reddit a person asked for help taking down non-consensual photos they said were taken when they were a minor, hacked from Snapchat, and posted on LeakedBB, among other sites. 

“I am in school to become a teacher and searched my name on google. If you go down a bit these websites come up,” they wrote. “I am so devastated and can’t believe this has happened to me.” 

While speaking to The Press outside his residence on June 25, Maharaj said that when it came to publishing non-consensual pornography and child sexual abuse imagery, “It should be obvious anyone’s against that.”

Who Is Lucifer NightStar?

Lucifer NightStar was the username for the only account with the title of “Administrator” on the LeakedBB forum. This user posted FAQs for the site and almost every forum announcement throughout its history. 

The URL of this account’s profile page shows the user ID (UID) of “1”. According to documentation for MyBB, a free and open source forum software that LeakedBB has credited for powering the site, the first user of the forum is assigned the UID “1” and has super administrator privileges – meaning their account cannot be deleted, banned or otherwise altered by regular administrators.

While the profile did not state the user’s location, it did show a local timestamp based on the user’s timezone settings, which matched GMT+12 – a timezone used in several countries in Oceania, including New Zealand and Fiji. 

Lucifer NightStar’s recent posts generally avoid mentioning non-consensual intimate imagery, focusing on administrative updates and issues, troubleshooting and the annual Christmas contest. However, in the first few months of the forum’s existence, the user posted a thread with a “LeakedBB Exclusive” of “leaked Kiwi girls”.

In another discussion thread from 2020, Lucifer NightStar vouched for a user’s ability to “influence” another member’s ex-girlfriend to share nudes.

Maharaj did not respond to The Press and Bellingcat’s question about whether he was Lucifer NightStar. However, one of the administrator’s posts led us to a clue pointing to Maharaj’s possible connection with LeakedBB. 

Logica Ltd and MyBBplugins

In one post in May 2021, responding to a user reporting problems paying with Apple Pay, Lucifer NightStar shared a screenshot of what the payment screen should look like. A company name was visible in this image: “Logica LTD”.

New Zealand company records show that Logica Limited was registered by Maharaj in February 2021, just months before this post. The company address is also in Christchurch, where Maharaj lives.

(Note: This is a different company from Logica Partners Limited, based in Auckland, which has no apparent connection with Maharaj or LeakedBB and is unrelated to this investigation.) 

The records from the New Zealand Companies Office show that Maharaj has been the sole director of Logica Limited since its incorporation. He stated on his LinkedIn profile that he was self-employed as the CEO of Logica NZ from May 2020 to August 2021. 

(Maharaj’s LinkedIn profile appears to have been deleted between June 13 and June 15, after The Press and Bellingcat’s initial enquiries and during the period his lawyer said he was in Fiji attending a family member’s funeral.)

But that was not the only connection to Logica Limited. On May 4, 2022, a YouTube user with the display name “LeakedBB” uploaded a video on how to pay for memberships on the site. This video was also embedded on LeakedBB’s homepage. 

The video showed how users could pay by credit card. When they clicked to purchase a membership, LeakedBB would redirect them to another website to buy a digital avatar pack with a price corresponding to their selected membership tier. 

After purchasing this “referral product”, users were encouraged to leave a comment and a positive rating to receive an “extra bonus month”. Archived versions of the website show view counts in the tens of thousands for some of these avatar packs. 

The thumbnails of the “digital avatars” as well as their price and description, as shown in the video, were identical to those shown on the archived version of a site, logica.nz, which is recorded as Logica Limited’s website on OpenCorporates. This site also lists “Logica LTD” in its copyright information at the bottom of its landing page. 

(Bellingcat last accessed a live version of the video on June 15. By July 1, we noticed that the video had been removed by the uploader.)

In a forum thread on LeakedBB dedicated to explaining alternative ways to pay for membership, hundreds of users posted that they had just purchased the “Mystic Avatar Pack” or the “Pixel Avatar Pack” to gain access to the site. One user included screenshots of their purchase, showing the site URL to be “logica.nz”. Other users also stated that they had made the purchase on this website and were waiting to receive their upgrades.

This website’s landing page now displays only a note stating that it is under maintenance. However, according to archives captured by the Internet Archive, it was still selling “digital avatar packs” in March 2025.

This type of payment structure not only conceals the nature of the transaction from the payment processor (as non-consensual content violates most platforms’ terms of service), but it also hides the transactions for the user, as payments are not described as being made to “LeakedBB” on bank statements.

When asked about the links between LeakedBB and Logica Limited, Maharaj only told The Press at the doorstep interview on June 25 that “Logica was my company. I cannot say what happened there right now”.

According to the New Zealand Companies Register, Logica Limited is in good standing, with its most recent annual filing submitted by Maharaj in March 2026. 

The Domain Name System (DNS) records of LeakedBB revealed another connection that seems to point back to Maharaj. Using online investigations tool DNSlytics, we viewed DNS records for the website and found that in 2020, the MX (mail exchange) record for LeakedBB.com was set to LeakedBB.net. An MX record is the mail server set up to accept emails for that domain. For LeakedBB.com, this was later changed to ProtonMail. 

While the WHOIS ownership of LeakedBB.net is obscured, we found it on a list of sites that had DNS certificates issued by another site, mybbplugins.com. A DNS certificate is used to prove ownership of a domain and requires an administrator to validate that certificate. 

According to WHOIS records from cyberthreat intelligence platform DomainTools, mybbplugins.com was publicly registered to Maharaj from December 2011 to February 2019, after which the registrant information was redacted.

The same site also issued a DNS certificate for a domain bearing Maharaj’s name (jitendramaharaj.com) as well as two domains that include part of his first name, jit-pay.cc and thejitshow.com. DNS certificates for these domains were issued between 2016 and 2021, according to free Certificate Transparency monitoring site crt.sh. Both “leakedbb” and the domain names linked to Maharaj’s name (i.e. “jitendramaharaj”, “jit-pay” and “thejitshow”) were also used as subdomains for mybbplugins.com, records from DomainTools show. 

Another link appeared when we inspected the code of the oldest saved archive of the payment screen on LeakedBB, from November 2019, which showed a ProtonMail address associated with the PayPal form at the time with a string of seven digits as the username. 

This string of seven digits is an exact match for what appears to be part of a Fiji-based phone number listed on WHOIS records for websites registered to Maharaj’s name including mybbplugins.com, from 2008 to 2011. It is unclear whether Maharaj was using this phone number in 2019, by the time LeakedBB was set up, and a different Fiji-based phone number was used with his name when the registration for mybbplugins.com was renewed in 2016.

Explore some of the links between Maharaj and LeakedBB:

From MyBB to LeakedBB

Bellingcat also found several other apparent connections between Maharaj and other applications hosting adult content. 

An account with the username “Jitendra M.” has been posting on the MyBB community forum since 2008, with the account ID originally using the username “Darkmew”. An archived capture of this account’s profile information showed a date of birth and a location in Fiji. 

This date of birth matches the one listed on a Facebook profile Bellingcat found under Maharaj’s name. His LinkedIn profile also shows that prior to moving to Christchurch, he worked in Nadi, Fiji, and he has listed addresses in the city for some of the domains registered to his name, as well as an email with a Fijian domain. This user also mentions that they are a pilot. 

Jitendra M.’s profile bears a “former staff” label, indicating that he used to work for MyBB. A previous commit (save) of a file containing details of MyBB team members shows that the full name associated with this account’s user ID and username was “Jitendra Maharaj”, and his website was listed as jitendra-maharaj.com. 

Archived versions of this site show photos and details that match those from Maharaj’s public social media profiles and interviews. For example, a 2011 capture shows that he mentioned being a pilot at a company called Pacific Sun. Pacific Sun was later rebranded as Fiji Link, and Maharaj’s LinkedIn profile, before it was deleted, stated that he worked for Fiji Link from 2009 to 2015. A blog post on the site also refers to mybbplugins.com as the author’s “newest endeavour”.

Very shortly after joining the MyBB community forum in Feb 2008, Jitendra M. asked about using MyBB for “warez” (an internet slang term for pirated digital content) and/or adult content. He stated that he was “interested in using it for a [sic] adult forum”. 

During this time, he also posted asking about streaming videos from a server and how to use a PayPal account without a credit card for “people putting money into my account for services I provide”. In late 2008, Jitendra M. purchased a web domain, reaperscrypt.info, which Wayback Machine archives show hosted pornographic content while it was online in 2009. This domain was publicly registered to Maharaj from November 2008 to January 2010. 

In 2013, he posted about selling the mybbplugins.com domain. However, as previously mentioned, Maharaj’s name was still publicly registered as the owner of the domain until February 2019, when registration data was redacted.

Bellingcat was able to view Facebook and Instagram accounts under Maharaj’s name and showing his profile picture in early May. These accounts painted a picture of a family man, with his public photos mainly showing his wife and children. His Facebook account had been either deleted or made private by May, and his Instagram account, while still active, has not been updated since 2013.

Archives of an X account using the same username as Maharaj’s Facebook and Instagram accounts also show several posts from November 2019 promoting LeakedBB. 

The “Darkmew” username that Jitendra M. originally used was also used for a GitHub account which hosts a repository described as the “official repository for Pay it Now – PIN Token”. This account, which now redirects to an account with the username “JitMaharaj”, has also forked (or copied) two apps created by other people: one to create a subscription platform “like onlyfans.com” that uses cryptocurrency for payments; the other designed to scrape and report illicit content from LeakedBB.

These forked repositories were among 38 visible on JitMaharaj’s account on June 17, but by July 1 – after a June 22 query from The Press asking Maharaj whether he owned this account – there were only 25 repositories listed on this account. The two repositories mentioned above were among those removed.

Maharaj did not respond to questions about whether he owned any of the accounts or domains mentioned in this section.

‘Hiding Behind Screens’

Mahoney said that successfully removing clients’ images from platforms like LeakedBB was a time-consuming task. “Some sites, usually the sites hosted overseas, will just ignore the request and won’t take them down,” she said.

In the US, which accounted for almost half (40 percent) of LeakedBB’s web traffic in May, the Take it Down Act recently came into effect. The new federal law requires platforms to quickly remove non-consensually shared intimate imagery when it is reported.

However, there has been little discussion of the law on LeakedBB. One user asked in the “Help” forum how this act would affect the site and its members back in October 2025, but Lucifer NightStar never responded to this post.

Rocket said having content removed for her US-based clients could be difficult when the platforms were based overseas: “A lot of it depends on where the platform is hosted, who runs their ad network and who is monetising – who their payment processors are,” she said. 

LeakedBB accepted cryptocurrency payments through NOWPayments, a cryptocurrency payments gateway based in the Netherlands and Estonia. The purchase page for its subscription plans, which allowed users to gain unrestricted access to the site, redirected to a NOWPayments purchase screen to transfer cryptocurrency to LeakedBB. 

In response to questions from Bellingcat, NOWPayments confirmed that LeakedBB’s activities violated its terms of service. The payments provider said it had deactivated LeakedBB’s account and blacklisted the platform immediately, as of June 4. 

LeakedBB did have a form for people to request that their content be taken down under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a US copyright law. However, this required victims to submit personal information such as a physical address and a business email address, and stated that it would reject requests that used email addresses from free services like Google and ProtonMail. Such details appear to go beyond those required for DMCA takedown requests on other sites: for example, Google only requires a first and last name, and an email address from any domain.

In one Reddit thread discussing the difficulty of removing content from LeakedBB under the DMCA, someone commented: “Some of this seems fairly standard, some of it seems like it’s designed to make people not request a takedown for fear of doxing [sic] themselves.”

On the page to submit DMCA takedown requests, LeakedBB also stated that successful requests would lead to them removing content hosted on their servers, but not links to third-party hosting providers – which is how a large portion of the content was made available to the website’s users. 

In New Zealand, where Maharaj is based, posting intimate imagery without consent is illegal under the Harmful Digital Communications Act. People face up to two years imprisonment or a fine up to NZ$50,000 (US$29,200), while for a company, the fine can be as high as NZ$200,000. 

Netsafe is the only approved body in the country that handles complaints under this act. The agency’s chief online safety officer Sean Lyons told The Press that the law was quite novel and other jurisdictions were “envious” when it was enacted – it was able to respond to generative AI technology that didn’t exist when it was written, and gave New Zealand courts powers to issue takedown orders, even in other countries.

Still, Lyons said the law had its limitations: it was mostly intended for use where one individual was harming another, and if the responsible party was overseas, the law’s efficacy largely relied on responsible platforms doing the right thing. 

“There are times when within our process, we will have contacted platforms or hosts and they will have said, ‘Who the heck are you?’…[Or] ‘We know what we’re doing, we are quite comfortable with what we are doing, and we don’t give a stuff about what it is that you are telling us, or about New Zealand law, or about the harm.’”

Mahoney and Rocket agreed that current laws were limited in their effectiveness against sites like LeakedBB. 

“The fact of the matter is there are places where … until there is an enforceable international law, that content is going to be available forever, which means there is a risk of it being shared forever,” Rocket said. 

Mahoney said image-based abusers have also become more sophisticated over time: “Technology is advancing, and the law is always playing catch-up,” she said. 

But she suggested that identifying those responsible for the abuse could have a deterrent effect: “The anonymity that people have hiding behind screens really contributes to this and emboldens people to act in ways that are very abusive to people.

“If people understand that there’s a risk that their identity and their bad behaviour will be revealed, the hope is that it will curtail some of this and dissuade people from engaging in this type of conduct, which is so, so harmful to the victims.” 

If you are a victim or know anyone who is affected by image-based abuse, resources and support are available through StopNCII.org.

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Galen Reich and Melissa Zhu from Bellingcat and Michael Wright from The Press contributed to this article. 

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