The UK media regulator says the porn company it fined £1 million for failing to comply with the Online Safety Act has started including stricter age checks on some of its websites.
4 December Ofcom announced a £1 million fine to AVS Group Ltd.which operates a number of pornographic websites due to the lack of good enough age verification methods.
An Ofcom spokesman said that since the decision, AVS has introduced a “highly effective age detection method on some websites” that can detect whether a child is using a site or not.
He added that the group could still face a fine of £1,000 a day until the body is “satisfied” with the changes it has made across all its platforms.
Ofcom also fined AVS an additional £50,000 for failing to respond to emails since the investigation began in July.
Asked whether it had heard from AVS since then, the regulator said it could not comment on an ongoing open investigation.
After the £1 million fine was announced last week, BBC News contacted TubeCorporate, the adult content platform behind AVS group Ltd's websites, for a response but has yet to receive one.
The address the firm uses is in the Central American country of Belize and appears to be the registered address of a large number of companies, although it does not have physical offices there.
The UK's Online Safety Act sets out a legal requirement for websites hosting pornographic material to implement what the regulator defines as “highly effective ageing” to prevent children from easily accessing explicit content.
Stricter age checks for porn sites were introduced in July, although some say they can easily be avoided by using a virtual private network (VPN), which redirects Internet traffic through another country.
Recent Ofcom report An analysis of UK media habits found that VPN use more than doubled after age verification requirements were introduced, with the number of daily users rising from around 650,000 before July and peaking at more than 1.4 million in mid-August.
