In this episode we will take a look on corporate structure of Mindgeek - leading company in content delivery, SEO, advertisement, hosting and general tech innovation. They operate worldwide and websites owned by them generate hundreds of millions visits per day and more bandwidth than Twitter, Amazon, or Facebook. Maybe you don't know this company but I bet they know you.
In case you missed last episode, it's available below.
Note
Mindgeek operates in adult entertainment field so if you are not comfortable reading about porn industry, leave the site.
Article does not mean to proof any wrongdoing of Mindgeek, I choose this company as an example due to distributed corporate structure and interesting strategy to expend their business.
I am not associated in any way with Mindgeek.
Short story of MG
The whole story began in 2003 when group consisting of Ouissam Youssef, Stephane Manos, Matt Keezer and two other persons founded company dubbed Mansef. They operated affiliate networks and as a holding company for TGP (thumbnail gallery post) websites. After many successes in porn industry they started to grow and created brands like Pornhub in 2007 or Brazzers couple years before. Story gets it's tempo in 2009 when Secret Service seized more than $6 milion from Mansef due to money laundering accusations.
In the meantime, German citizen Fabian Thylmann, who invented NATS (Next-Generation Affiliate Tracking Software) used in affiliate networks, was acquiring brands like MyDirtyHobby, Webcams or Xtube.
After episode with Secret Service, Stephane Manos and group sold Mansef to Fabian Thylmann and now they run Valnet Inc. and Valsef Capital online media (not porn related).
Thylmann changed company name to Manwin and build a porn empire in next couple years. For example in 2009 his website "My dirty Hobby" was earning up to 3 millions euro per month. Besides obvious income methods like paid content, Manwin was selling his traffic and had annual sales of nearly half a billion dollars and a profit of almost $170 million. The story also contain many mysteries and one of them might be loan he got from secret donors for $362 millions. At the top, Manwin had under control following brands: Playboy TV, Digital Playground, Twistys, YouPorn, Redtube, or Gaytube among others. History known from Mansef repeats also for Manwin, in December 2012 Fabian Thylmann was extradited to Germany due to tax evasion suspicions. "My Dirty Hobby" was associated with Cyprus company "Colbette Holding Limited", which handled international payment processing but money didn't go through Manwin's German HQ. Also Bahamas company "Carsed Marketing" (not active anymore) related to Twistys, took it's part in tax evasion process. Searching the company name in Offshore Leaks Database, you can find that it's intermediary of "Valdy Administration (Bahamas) LTD". Same as 550 other companies.
All charges have been dropped after he paid 5 millions euro, however, in 2013, he sold Manwin for $100 millions to Feras Antoon and David Tassilo. They run the company for this day only changed name to Mindgeek.
From couple years Mindgeek is in buying-spree and extends it's business as much as possible. These are only the popular brands owned by them:
Pornhub
YouPorn
RedTube
Tube8
XTube
ExtremeTube
PornMD
PornIQ
Peeperz
GayTube
Babes.com
Men.com
Sextube
SpankWire
MyDirtyHobby
Webcams.com
Brazzers
DigitalPlayground
RealityKings
Mofos
Twistys
Playboy
WickedPictures
You can recognize if site is owned by Mindgeek by looking at terms & privacy
or footer of the site
but they are also engages in different areas of the Internet. First, they own company "Traffic Junky" that sells traffic and serves 3.9 billion daily ad impressions. Second, they push Age-ID which is secure solution to get access to age-restricted websites. Third, they build games, mobile applications and provide VPN access. What is all this for? I hope I will give some answers in next chapters.
Corporate structure of Mindgeek
After this short and probably boring but necessary introduction we already know a bit about history of the company. Before each corporate related investigation, first take a look on a big picture, track roots and important changes in organization. Thanks to this, you won't be surprised finding completely not related, on first eye sight, companies associated with your target.
MindGeek operates under a complex structure of multiple companies in countries such as the British Virgin Islands, Canada, Curaçao, Cyprus, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mauritius, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Its structure has been described as mostly a way to avoid corporate tax by a de facto Canadian company; with billing companies in Ireland, subsidiaries in Curaçao and holding ones in Cyprus and Luxembourg, all countries that have been identified as tax havens or having lax tax regulations. Canada also has special tax treaties with Luxembourg, the legal headquarters of MindGeek, where a Canadian subsidiary is exempt from taxes paid on royalties to its Luxembourg parent.
Sounds like a perfect example to practice OSINT skills and find all of these companies, their use and people engaged.
Two best sources, in my opinion, for tracking corporate structure are
OpenCorporates
and Corporation Wiki
The second one offers simple network visualization, which is quite cool when you have couple assets and want to see everything in clear way.
However OpenCorporates has something that Corporation Wiki does not and it made my work so much easier. The thing I'm talking about is a corporate grouping. Users can contribute to any company and add details like subsidiary, branch, alternate names or information about officers. Thanks to this I didn't have to search for each organization owned by Mindgeek but instead corporate grouping in OpenCorporates shows 172 companies managed by Mindgeek.
https://opencorporates.com/corporate_groupings/MindGeek/companies?page=1
It includes every necessary detail to support the investigation - Jurisdiction, Registered Address, Officers, Incorporation Date or Status. It also links to the official government documents about company what gives even more leads to follow.
Visualizing corporations
OpenCorporates shows that MindGeek manages 172 companies in 11 countries. We can still find Thylmann's legacy companies like "COLBETTE HOLDINGS LIMITED" or inactive ones like "MG HOSTING LIMITED" from Ireland. So, what is the best way to present scale of the organization?
They also provides free API access up to 100 requests. You can easily access MG corporate grouping with endpoint
https://api.opencorporates.com/v0.4/corporate_groupings/mindgeek
which gives details about every company associated with Mindgeek. We will categorize it by country, so we need to take couple things into account, what jurisdiction it operates under and if company is active.
import json
import requests
req = requests.get("https://api.opencorporates.com/v0.4/corporate_groupings/mindgeek")
req_json = json.loads(req.content)
return_dict = {'name':"Mindgeek",'children':[]}
inside_dict = {"main":1,'children':[]}
active = True
for i in req_json['results']['corporate_grouping']['memberships']:
print(i['membership']['company']['name'])
print(i['membership']['company']['jurisdiction_code'])
if i['membership']['company']['inactive']:
active = 1
else:
active = 0
inside_dict["name"] = i['membership']['company']['jurisdiction_code']
inside_dict['children'].append({"name":i['membership']['company']['name'], "value": 2, 'inactive':active})
return_dict['children'].append(inside_dict)
print(json.dumps(return_dict))
Above code makes a request to the corporate grouping of Mindgeek, iterates over the records and prints names and jurisdiction code. I already created two dictionaries because I knew the format for d3 JS visualization. To show it's scale and distributed nature I decided to use circle packing visualization, where each bubble mean company and biggest circles are countries.
I had to tweak the JavaScript a little bit so it could support my idea to differentiate inactive companies. I also added two additional keys to default json file - "main" and "inactive" and adjusted one line to fill it in with different color.
.attr("fill", function(d) { return d.data.inactive == 1 ? "grey" : (d.data.main) ? "white" : "green";})
Basically, it means that if company is inactive then make it grey. Parameter "main" is used to make "country bubbles" white and rest of the companies, i.e. active ones are green.
Now it's much more visible and we can clearly see where it operates and how many companies are located in specific country. OpenCorporates still links to the legacy Manwin/Mansef companies in Mauritius or Bahamas but they are already inactive and do not count as a valid Mindgeek assets.
I chose to sort it by country to show you scale of the business. There are many companies that are responsible for different things like websites, payments, intellectual property, studios or games. I spent lot of time to sort these organizations by their use, i.e. why this particular company exist and what tasks it performs.
I want to highlight, that is' not an easy task to do. Mindgeek has very distributed corporate structure with many companies/officers and with alternate names for lots of their organizations. For example terms and conditions on Bang U TV or Mofos TV state that site is operated by Cordiacon Developments Ltd, Froytal Services Ltd, and Alamea Holdings Limited.
Cordiacon Developments Ltd is a company that has been dissolved in 2015.
https://opencorporates.com/companies/gb/06858633
Alamea Holdings Limited now is known by the name MG BILLING CY
https://opencorporates.com/companies/cy/HE267496
Froytal Services Ltd is an alternate name for Canadian company MG PREMIUM LTD
https://opencorporates.com/companies/ca_qc/1167412353
In addition the last one was suspected of money laundering in 2012
So, I sorted it according their use and I will present example sources that confirm my assumptions.
Websites
The first obvious things to check for ownership of the website is to look into Privacy Policy or Terms and Conditions. For example footer on babes.com shows that site is managed by MG PREMIUM LTD.
Quick Google dork "©2020 MG Premium Ltd. All Rights Reserved." will reveal all websites operated by this organization. However, it's not always possible since MG add image to footer instead of a text.
Copyright related papers must disclose full names of the all providers to get actual notifications about infringements. From there we can add another companies and websites operated by MG.
These methods allowed me to narrow companies that are responsible for operating different websites:
- CORDIACON DEVELOPMENTS LTD
- MG FREESITES LTD
- MG PREMIUM LTD
- MG FREESITES II LTD
- MG TECHNOLOGIES LTD
- Webnovas Technologies Inc.
- MG Mainstream S.a.r.l.
- MG Technologies S.a.r.l.
- MG Premium S.a.r.l.
- MG Freesites S.a.r.l.
- MG Luxembourg S.a.r.l
- MG Reality S.a.r.l.
- MG Media S.a.r.l.
- MG GLOBAL ENTERTAINMENT INC.
- PREMIUM HUB INC.
- MG MAINSTREAM LTD
- Midstream Media International N.V.
Studios/Brands
These subcategory was simple, there are many popular brands owned by MG and googling name of the company gives you even wikipedia page about the brand or studio. Unfortunately, not every company has it's own website and is not recognizable worldwide. In this case we can use Linkedin and look for organization details. Even when company has no description, people disclose many information via their experience.
Based on the experience from one of the former employee of MG and current employee of Reimsberg Developments Inc we can conclude that it's a film studio.
Based on Google and Linkedin I separated following studios and brands:
- CLUB JENNA, INC
- DOLCE AMORE, INC.
- SPICETV.COM, INC.
- DIGITAL PLAYGROUND, INC.
- REALITY KINGS, LLC
- BRAZZERS TECHNOLOGIES INC.
- Reimsberg Developments Inc.
- Playboy Plus Entertainment, Inc.
- Playboy TV/UK Benelux Limited
- CODY MEDIA, INC.
Intellectual Property
Thanks to registered trademarks, we can connect one or more companies to each other. Trademarkia.com is a must have source during this types of investigations.
It also gives insight view of the new campaigns that company is currently engaged in. Let's take a look on Licensing IP International S.a.r.l.
They own trademarks for popular brands like "StayHomeHub", "VPN hub", "Pornhub Awards", "Redtube" and "Clippy The Bear". The last one has been registered last month and it looks like Mindgeek will try to release new product.
DOWNLOADABLE COMPUTER CHATBOT SOFTWARE FOR SIMULATING CONVERSATION;
DOWNLOADABLE COMPUTER SOFTWARE FOR REPLYING TO QUESTIONS FROM ONLINE RETAIL STORE CUSTOMERS RELATED TO THE SUBJECT OF ADULT ENTERTAINMENT
Second useful source related to intellectual property is Google Transparency Records. It shows what company asks Google to take down urls due to copyright infringement. The reports show that MG PREMIUM LTD is responsible for reporting these url and for example, on 11th of May they requested almost 1.5 millions url to be delisted. Full chart is accessible below
Because of high volume of infringements, they decide to go after people that upload the videos. They are taking case to the court to identify individuals and "asks" Cloudflare to help.
Mindgeek has a specific relationships to copyright infringements on their own tube sites. The quote from National Post article explains it pretty well.
Even content producers that MindGeek owns have trouble getting their movies off MindGeek’s tube sites. The result has been a vampiric ecosystem: MindGeek’s producers make porn films mostly for the sake of being uploaded on to MindGeek’s free tube sites, with lower returns for the producers but higher returns for MindGeek, which makes money off of the tube ads that does not go to anyone involved in the production side. https://nationalpost.com/news/how-a-canadian-founded-company-youve-never-heard-of-took-control-of-the-porn-industry
Clever, right?
I identified following companies responsible for intellectual property things
- MG IP S.a.r.l.
- MG IP II S.a.r.l.
- MG Licensing Europe S.a.r.l.
- Licensing IP International S.a.r.l.
- MG PREMIUM LTD
Advertisement/Affiliate programs
MG covers most trafficked areas of the Internet so it's obvious move to sell the traffic that these websites have generated. I had no problems in establishing which companies are used for advertising, Traffic Junky is widely known and WebExpansion Inc and ExpansionWeb Inc are a legacy companies. One additional company - 6721851 CANADA INC, was used at the beginning to promote whole idea about internet advertising/marketing and monetize the clicks. It was known by many different alternative names.
Beside trafficjunky.com, they also operate for example adultforce.com.
I found following advertising companies:
- trafficjunky inc.
- WebExpansion Inc.
- EXPANSIONWEB INC.
- 6721851 CANADA INC.
Games/Applications
Adult entertainment it's not only videos and pictures, Mindgeek owns NUTAKU ENTERTAINMENT LTD known as the 'steamy steam'. It's a steam like platform for adult gaming with millions of users. The gaming platform proofs that MG extends their activity to every possible field to give users maximum experience. Nutaku is a known brand operating from 2014 but MG manages other companies that develops mobile apps but they are not related to adult entertainment industry.
Mirmay Limited (https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=7557161041199736267&hl=en_GB) developed:
- Downloader & Private Browser - Kode Browser - 1.3 mln downloads
- Private Downloader - 25k downloads
AppAtomic Limited (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appatomic.vpnhub&hl=en_GB) developed:
- VPNhub Best Free Unlimited VPN - Secure WiFi Proxy - 166k downloads
Liquidum Limited (https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=5055253408139725132&hl=en_GB) developed:
- Rocket VPN – Internet Freedom - 65k downloads
Two additional companies engaged in mobile apps are:
- SUPER HIPPO STUDIOS LIMITED (known from erotic RPG "Sacred Sword Princesses")
- NUTAKU PUBLISHING LIMITED
Why they invest in such application? Technical analysis of mobile application in part 2. Stay tuned.
Payments
The last category that ensures money flow are payment related organizations. Processing big amount of customer's payments requires separate companies and authorized agents as well as organized client support service.
Probiller.com is a company directly owned by Mindgeek and others are authorized agent. All of them support almost every type of payment and currency - Skrill, Paysafe Card, Paypal or Bitcoin.
Following companies are associated with payments
- MG BILLING CY LTD
- PRO BILLER INC.
- COLBETTE HOLDINGS LIMITED
- MG PROCESSING II CORP.
- MG BILLING LIMITED
- MG BILLING US CORP.
Most of the companies are located in Cyprus or Luxembourg.
Other
There are plenty other companies that have no online records so it's hard to categorize it in any way, however I still haven't exhausted sources that I want to show you, so take a look on some uncategorized companies.
Court cases are trove of information to get insight what company is up to. Bright Imperial Ltd. sued another porn company RT MEDIASOLUTIONS, S.R.O. for trademark exploitation. Defendant owned websites red-tube.com which is an infringement of redtube.com owned by Bright Imperial Ltd. at that time.
Another way to collect information about organization activities are patents they use or were sued over. Case Joao Control & Monitoring Systems, LLC et al. v. Johnsburg LTD. shows all defendants i.e. every organization engaged in alleged infringement.
and of course patent that whole case is about. The patent is about video recording and being precise
A monitoring apparatus and method including a processing device for receiving video information recorded by a video recording device or a camera, wherein the video recording device or a camera is located at a vehicle or a premises and the processing device is located at a location remote from the vehicle or premises.
Wikiwand is an extremely useful source that I found out lately. You can view edits and talk about any Wikipedia page. Users shares their own researches and proofs to make the page even more reliable. There are many archived information that I wasn't able to find somewhere else and it dispelled my doubts in many cases.
Other companies with unknown use
You can follow the lead and investigate some of them on your own.
- RK NETMEDIA, INC.
- MANWIN/RK COLLATERAL TRUST
- Midstream Media International N.V.
- MG Germany GmbH - Germany HQ
- MG HOSTING LIMITED
- Colbette II Limited
- MindGeek RK S.a.r.l.
- STATSnet Nightlife S.a.r.l.
- DONORMASS LTD
- GONETMARKET INC.
- CYGEST TRADING LTD
- STATSnet Holding S.a.r.l.
- MG JVP S.a.r.l.
- DMMG S.a.r.l.
- CSMG LTD
- BRIGHT IMPERIAL LIMITED - Redtube
- MG SOCIAL LTD - AgeID
So we already know the company structure, what they do and where they are located. Only one thing left - to meet the people behind this infrastructure.
Officers
You should already known major figures that manageD whole business - Stephane Manos, Ouissam Yousef, Fabian Thylmann, these people currently are not actively involved in the company. Nowadays, people behind the wheel are: Feras Antoon and David Marmorstein Tassillo (according Wikipedia). We have already our corporate grouping ready and OpenCorporates also shows officers associated with the company making visualization much easier.
req = requests.get("https://api.opencorporates.com/v0.4/corporate_groupings/mindgeek")
req_json = json.loads(req.content)
for i in enumerate(req_json['results']['corporate_grouping']['memberships']):
req2 = requests.get("https://api.opencorporates.com/v0.4/companies/"+i['membership']['company']['jurisdiction_code']+"/"+i['membership']['company']['company_number'])
req2_json = json.loads(req2.content)
for i in req2_json['results']['company']['officers']:
try:
print(req2_json['results']['company']['name'] + ";"+i['officer']['name'])
except Exception as e:
print(e)
Above code is similar to the previous one, I just added additional request to check for officers in each company from corporate Mindgeek groupings. At the end you will have a big csv like output semicolon seperated officer and name of the company. In some cases there are more than one officer for organization which gives more relationships and possible connections.
After that, we can import file to the Gephi and tune our chart. I used Force Atlas 2 with stronger gravity and scaling around 20. Nodes are size ranked by modularity.
Follow me on twitter
the_wojciech
This visualization is crystal clear, I didn't know that it will be so readable. It's separated into couple parts, mostly by country or officer. So, at the bottom of the chart (brown-ish color) you see legacy Mansef companies owned by Stehpane Manos and Ouissam Youssef
On the right (blue color) companies owned by Feras Antoon and David Marmorstein Tassillo are highlighted.
but, of course, there are more than that, companies in different countries have completely other structure. Couple of persons seem to have a lot of organizations under their names, especially in Cyprus with connection to Great Britain.
- ANDREAS ALKIVIADES ANDREOU (ΑΝΔΡΕΑΣ ΑΛΚΙΒΙΑΔΗΣ ΑΝΔΡΕΟΥ)
- ANDREAS ANDREOU (ΑΝΔΡΕΑΣ ΑΝΔΡΕΟΥ).
I mentioned earlier about difficulties with identifying companies based on their names and alternates names. It's similar with people, it turns out that Andreas Andreou is super popular name in Cyprus and these are two different people. From Mindgeek Linkedin page, we can learn that first of them is a Director for 10+ year and second works for almost 5 years.
On each official statement, only ANDREAS ANDREOU is signed as a director.
But I strongly believe that every document refers to ANDREAS ALKIVIADES ANDREOU (ΑΝΔΡΕΑΣ ΑΛΚΙΒΙΑΔΗΣ ΑΝΔΡΕΟΥ) since he is a Director of Corporate Finance.
That's very solid grunt for deeper research, we have names, relationships, associations, companies and more that shows how big and powerful this company is. For people who want to continue the research, mentioned director is a good place to start.
Offshore Leaks database mentions Alkiviades Andreas, however I am not able to connect this individual to the one from Offshore Leaks. It means, I can't proof that this is the same individual. Only deeper research can confirm the assumption.
Summary
Personally, Mindgeek is one of my favorite corporation, they operate mostly in shadow and almost no one who is not deep into porn industry does not know about them. For such a big company, they do not have any scandals, problems with diversity or other nowadays' corporate issues. You won't hear about them in mainstream because brands like Pornhub, Redtube or Youporn tell by themselves. In some fields it's still a taboo topic to talk about porn industry and so about any ownership. They expand their business aggressively by buying smaller companies, providing new experiences or protecting their content. Social campaigns created by Pornhub reached mainstream and they will go this way to serve mainstream-related ads on their platform and be advertised wider. In addition, AgeID regulations will most probably be a nail in the coffin for MG competitors. I think, in next 10 years, Mindgeek will reach level of porn monopoly.
From technical perspective, I would love to work there with all the big data they collect everyday and potential security incidents they experience.
Part 2 will consists of technical analysis of Mindgeek assets, how to discover domains and subdomains based only on organization's name, analysis of their mobile application and other OSINT techniques.
Further reading
https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/MindGeek
Ben Woods
Gus Garcia-Roberts
Lars-Marten Nagel
Please subscribe for early access, new awesome things and more.