05.06.2023
3 min
1897
Deepfakes of nude bodies have become a new tool for digital violence. In 2025, Meta filed a lawsuit against the companies that launched the CrushAI and Crushmate apps, services that created fake intimate images of women without consent. These apps were actively promoted through Instagram advertising, showing hundreds of thousands of ads around the world. The investigation revealed links to Hong Kong and China, as well as schemes to bypass Meta’s filters. This story is about a profitable and dangerous business that objectifies women’s bodies in the digital space.
At first glance, Crushmate looked like just another one of many AI “girlfriend” or “companion” apps. The company’s numerous websites claimed to specialize in “creating your dream girlfriend with AI,” and its Google and Apple app stores described it as “an AI-powered communication product designed to provide users with a comprehensive emotional support and communication experience.”
But ads linking to the app on popular social media platforms showed it offering a completely different service: creating nude photos of women without consent.
Last week, Meta announced it was filing a lawsuit against Joy Timeline HK Limited (“Joy Timeline”), a Hong Kong company it said was behind a group of fake “nude” apps called “CrushAI,” which includes Crushmate. This follows 404 Media’s report in January that CrushAI had purchased thousands of ads on Instagram and Facebook, using multiple fake Facebook profiles to bypass Meta’s moderators.
However, the investigation uncovered two other companies in Hong Kong and mainland China – Soul friendship HK Limited (“Soul friendship”) and Wuhan Ruisen Zhuoxin Network Technology Co., Ltd (“Wuhan Ruisen”) – that appear to have ties to the apps.
CrushAI’s ads featured women, including celebrities and influencers, whose clothes had been artificially removed using deepfake technology. This led to pages asking users to upload photos of people and “remove their clothes.”
The 404 Media report prompted Illinois Senator Dick Durbin to write to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about CrushAI’s advertising on Meta’s platforms, stating that “the creation and distribution of unscrupulous, fake intimate images are acts of abuse and invasion of privacy that cause lasting harm to victims.”
When asked about two other companies that were linked to CrushAI, Meta said it was investigating their activities and would take action, including legal action, if necessary if it found violations of its policies. The company also said it would continue to take necessary action against other advertisers who abuse its platform.
Soul friendship was listed as the developer of Crushmate on the Apple App Store, while Wuhan Ruisen filed a U.S. federal trademark application related to the Crushmate brand last year. Documents supporting Wuhan Ruisen’s trademark application show that the app earned more than $45,000 in subscriptions between December 2023 and July of last year.
According to a legal document provided by Meta, the social media giant is seeking an injunction that would prevent Joy Timeline from running ads related to nude apps on its platforms. It is also seeking $289,200 in damages, including costs it says it incurred to investigate and remove ads for CrushAI apps, to respond to public and regulatory inquiries about the ads, and to take enforcement action against Joy Timeline.
The complaint alleged that as of February of this year, Joy Timeline had placed more than 87,000 infringing ads on Facebook and Instagram, primarily targeting users in the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
A Crushmate spokesperson said the app has since shut down, but that in its early stages of development it “relied very briefly on the support of many third-party partners.”
Regarding the relationship between CrushAI and Joy Timeline, as well as the two other companies, the spokesperson said that “since the project has ended and the team no longer exists, I am unfortunately unable to verify whether the company you mentioned in your email was one of our former partners.”
Soul Friendship, Joy Timeline, and Wuhan Ruisen did not respond to multiple requests for comment on their relationships with each other or CrushAI.
Like other infamous AI-based nudity programs, CrushAI appears to own multiple websites with the same domain name (“crushmate”) but different extensions such as .site .net .vip and .us. At least 23 domains were discovered using the name Crushmate, all of which are no longer available. Most of them were registered within two days of each other in April and July 2024. We also found other sites with an identical homepage layout and content to Crushmate, with similar domains such as “Crushai”, “crushh”, “crrru”, “crushx” and “crush1”.
Using Domain Tools, we were able to link these sites – and others – through an identical Google Analytics tag used to track website traffic.
While almost every one of these websites had their WHOIS registration information hidden for privacy reasons, one was not, and it was registered to Joy Timeline.
Our search on Whoxy, a reverse WHOIS lookup tool, revealed 158 domains publicly registered to Joy Timeline at the time of publication. Only one was called Crushmate, but 28 others had nearly identical designs and appeared to be deepfake “nudity” apps.
For example, archived versions of the homepages of two of these domains, “sparkaifun [dot] online” and “chatnplay [dot] online,” were identical to the homepage and “clothes elastic” pages on the CrushAI sites.
There may be other similar web domains that did not appear in our searches, as domain registrants can also hide their information. Other active domains owned by Joy Timeline, according to publicly available domain information, include, among others, the homepages of other chat apps, photo editing apps, and mobile games.
The Hong Kong Companies Registry listed a person named Zhang Xiao, who holds a Chinese passport, as the director of Joy Timeline.
The company was listed with 100 shares issued, with a total value of HK$100 ($12.80 USD). Company documents listed Zhang Xiao as the owner of 90 of these shares, while another Chinese national, Zhang Shiwei, owns 10 shares.
Zhang Shiwei is the director of the film “Soulful Friendship,” who is also linked to the CrushAI apps, according to the investigation.
Although Crushmate is no longer available on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, archived versions of its app listings on both stores led us to Soul friendship, another Hong Kong company.
The developer of Crushmate was listed on the Google Play Store as “LipLip Team” as of September 2024, according to a cached version of the page. Our online search for LipLip Team revealed that there was another app on the Play Store called “LipLip – Live Video Chat&Meet,” which appeared to be a chat app.
But the URL for LipLip’s page from the developer’s archived Google Play Store profile, based on both indexed copies of the Google Play Store listing and LipLip’s bio on X, contained the identifier “hk.soulfriendship.chat” – our first clue that another company was involved.
In the Google Play Store, the app ID, which is part of the URL, is based on the app’s package name, which uniquely identifies the app in the Play Store. The package name can be anything you want, as long as it’s not already used by any other app in the Play Store.
However, in this case, it’s very similar to the name of Soul friendship, the Hong Kong developer that published Crushmate and LipLip-Chat on the Apple App Store.
We were able to find more information about Soul Friendship by looking at the LipLip-Chat app page on Apple’s App Store as it appears from a European Union country.
Under the EU Digital Services Act, Apple is legally required to verify and display more detailed information for sellers distributing apps in the EU than in other jurisdictions.
This includes the developers’ Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number – a nine-digit numeric key that uniquely identifies companies worldwide – as well as contact information such as their address, phone number and email address.
Even outside the EU, this information can be easily viewed by changing the country code in the App Store URL.
For example, the developer information displayed in the LipLip-Chat app listing in the US app store only shows the name Soul Friendship. But simply changing the country code from “us” to “nl” (the country code for the Netherlands) reveals the company’s DUNS number, address, phone number, and email address:
The address listed for Soul friendship in the commercial district of Wan Chai, Hong Kong, is the same as that listed in the domain name registration records for Joy Timeline. This address is also listed as belonging to one of the approximately 6,900 Trust or Corporate Service Providers (TCSPs) in Hong Kong, which are authorized to provide, among other corporate services, a registered business or office address.
Documents from the Hong Kong Companies Registry show that Zhang Shiwei is the registered director of Soul Friendship.
Although they have different names and directors, the shareholders of Soul Friendship and Joy Timeline are the same, and there are many similarities in the way the two companies operate.
Like Joy Timeline, Soul Friendship was registered with 100 issued shares with a total value of HK$100. Similar to the arrangement for Joy Timeline, Zhang Shiwei, a director of Soul Friendship, owns 90 shares of Soul Friendship, while Zhang Xiao, a director of Joy Timeline, owns 10 shares.
In addition to the shared address associated with a transit service provider (TCSP) in Wan Chai, both companies used the same registered office address in Kwun Tong, an industrial and business district of Hong Kong, in their business documents. This is the address of another transit service provider (TCSP) that acts as the company secretary for both of these businesses.
Searches for “Soul friendship” and “Joy Timeline” on the Internet didn’t turn up many results, other than websites under their names that used identical templates. Neither website mentioned Crushmate or CrushAI, and both sites stated on their “About Us” pages that they were founded in 2022 and provide “IT consulting and software development services.”
To further complicate matters, two U.S. federal trademark applications were discovered filed for Crushmate by a mainland Chinese company, Wuhan Ruisen, in August 2024. The first application, in the “Advertising, Business and Retail Services” category, was rejected on the grounds that the company did not provide sufficient evidence of commercial use of the Crushmate trademark.
The second, in the “Computer and Software Products, and Electrical and Scientific Products” category, was officially registered with the trademark office on April 29, 2025. Documents filed for federal trademark applications are publicly available on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) website.
In its trademark applications, Wuhan Ruisen provided “samples”—examples of its trademark being used in commerce. These included screenshots of Crushmate’s Google Play Store and Apple App Store pages, where the app was developed by LipLip and Soul friendship HK, as well as screenshots of their website.
John Halsky, a U.S.-based lawyer whose practice focuses on trademarks and copyright, said a company can include samples or instances in its trademark application from another company under a third-party license.
However, Halsky said, whether multiple company names in an application will be challenged depends on the examiner.
“The [trademark] examiner has the right to ask, ‘You sent me this sample that shows party XYZ using it, and you claim your name is ABC.’ Then they can ask, ‘Is that under a license agreement?’
Anyone can apply for a trademark, regardless of whether they own it, but other parties can object to the application – for example, if they claim to be the original owner of the trademark – within 30 days of its publication. Wuhan Ruysen’s application for the trademark Crushmate was published on March 11 of this year and successfully registered without opposition on April 29.
The application documents included a screenshot that allegedly showed a Stripe payment dashboard with 4,563 successful payments. All visible payments were for $9.99, which was the weekly cost of a VIP subscription to Crushmate on the US site at the time of the application.
Assuming the only payments recorded by the dashboard were for these subscriptions, that would mean that Crushmate had earned at least $45,584.37 in subscriptions by the time the application was filed last August. It’s unclear what exact time frame is captured in the screenshot of this dashboard, although the application states that the first use of the trademark occurred on December 25, 2023.
Another screenshot included with the application, also apparently from Crushmate’s Stripe dashboard, showed the location distribution of Crushmate’s paying customers. This view of the Stripe dashboard displays the “tax thresholds” for each U.S. state and shows whether the income earned reached taxable status. The screenshot showed that Crushmate had paying customers across the U.S., with the highest number of transactions coming from Kentucky and Utah.
According to documents from China’s official enterprise registry, which match the company’s name and address in Chinese, Wuhan Ruisen was founded in March 2021 with a registered capital of 10 million Chinese yuan (US$1.38 million).
We are not naming the legal representative of Wuhan Ruisen, listed in these documents, as the exact relationship between the company and CrushAI is still unclear. The legal representative’s name does not appear in the business registration records of Soul friendship or Joy Timeline in Hong Kong.
A search of the company’s name in China’s Internet Content Provider License Database shows that it is registered for five different domain names. As of June, only one was available. The website, which describes the Wuhan-based company as a “professional software development company” specializing in desktop and mobile software development, lists a number of apps purportedly developed by the company. CrushAI’s apps were not among them.
Some of the apps on this page look very similar to software from foreign developers. For example, the first app on the page is an AI translator called “DeepL,” which is also the name of an AI translation app from a German startup that currently does not offer paid plans in mainland China.
Third-party consumer service platform Heimao Tousu received more than 40 complaints against the company between October 2023 and March 2025. Most of them said they paid between 29 and 69 yuan ($4 and $9.50) to download software they thought was genuine, only to find that the products were counterfeit or didn’t work. When they asked for a refund, they were ignored.
Wuhan Ruisen did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment, and when we called the phone number listed on its website, we received an automated message saying the number was invalid.
Crushmate’s X-platform profile and a US domain site bearing his name were available until April. That same month, the U.S. Pornography Removal Act was passed, criminalizing the distribution of pornography using deepfakes without consent at the federal level. It was signed into law in May, and Crushmate’s X-platform profile was removed around the same month.
At the time of publication, all 23 Crushmate domains, additional nude-related domains owned by Joy Timeline, and other CrushAI domains appeared to be either offline or displaying “under maintenance” messages after users registered and logged in.
After contacting the email address listed on several Crushmate websites, an anonymous person responded.
She stated that the decision to cease operations and dissolve the team was made “a few months” before the introduction of the Liquidation Law. “Since then, this mailbox has remained inactive,” the response stated.
It did not explain why the reply came from an inactive account, and it also ignored questions about the identity of the sender and his role in Crushmate or CrushAI. Joy Timeline is known to have purchased the domains back on May 14, but none of them currently contain nude content and do not appear to be used for this purpose.
