Families braced for hikes in bills VICTIM HITS OUT INTIMATE IMAGES
HOUSEHOLDS are about to see a host of essential bills rise steeply from tomorrow as firms roll out their annual April 1 price increases.
Council tax, road tax, broadband, mobile, water and even stamps are all about to jump in price on or around the first of the month, with households urged to check for savings by shopping around.
Council taxes are rising by various amounts in Wales, from around 5% in Torfaen to more than 11% in Pembrokeshire, as local authorities seek to maximise revenue to pay for struggling frontline services.
The average household water and sewerage bill in Wales and England will rise by 6% or about £27 to £473 a year from tomorrow.
Water UK said the funds raised by increased water bills were guaranteed only to fund improvements in water and sewerage systems, and bills would automatically be reduced by the regulator if they were not delivered.
Most broadband deals and mobile phone contracts will rise by a “completely unacceptable” 7.9% on April 1.
Many of the biggest broadband firms – such as BT, EE, Plusnet, Shell Energy, TalkTalk, Virgin Media and Vodafone – raise prices every April in line with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) or the Retail Price Index (RPI) – announced as February as 4% and 4.9% respectively – plus an additional 3%, 3.7% or 3.9%.
Uswitch calculated that the increase would cost the individual consumer around £27.19 more a year for broadband and £24.23 for mobile bills on average.
Separately, the annual cost of a TV Licence will rise to £169.50 from tomorrow, up from £159, which viewers need to pay to watch or record live TV shows on any channel, regardless of the device used. This includes watching anything via BBC iPlayer.
The UK Government confirmed in the Autumn Statement that vehicle excise duty, or road tax, will rise in line with the RPI from April 1.
For cars registered after April 1 2017, it means the tax is likely to rise from its current level of £180 per year to approximately £190 per year.
However, older vehicles or vehicles which emit higher levels of carbon dioxide will pay more.
The price of stamps will increase on April 2, first-class stamps by 10p to £1.35 and second-class stamps by 10p to 85p.
WEBSITES where men post and share intimate pictures of women without their knowledge or consent include images of hundreds of Welsh women.
A victim has warned women to be aware of the global issue, which has left her and many others feeling “sick and violated”.
The 25-year-old from Swansea, whom we are calling Katie to protect her identity, described how she discovered her photos had been leaked when she received a link on social media. She was horrified by what she saw when she clicked it.
She said: “The link takes you to an app, which either you can download or use on the internet. I downloaded the app and when I clicked the link I saw about a thousand girls from South Wales. We each had our individual folders. Inside those folders were super explicit photos and videos.
“I only looked at my own folder and it included two videos which I don’t even know how they would have got. I informed as many women as I could, some of them were my friends. One of my friends was even a minor. Some of them already knew about it so it had obviously gone around very quickly.”
Distraught by the discovery, Katie said she and a number of other girls contacted the police to see if anything could be done to stop the issue. It was then that they discovered the true magnitude of the problem, which was exacerbated by it being legal to share intimate photos at the time.
Katie said: “The police managed to get some of the links shut down but as soon as they closed them down more were popping up. We were in such a pickle. A police officer called and said there is not much else they could do – which is what I thought as it is so widespread.”
Feeling deflated and violated, Katie decided to research the issue further to see what else she could find. She quickly realised it was even worse than she had first thought.
She said: “I found a website which is an online chat forum with thousands of men from all over the world. In these groups they share photos of women, folders and links. It was horrific.
“At first we were mortified because we thought it was targeting South Wales women. On this website they have forums for areas across the UK and world. I saw forums for places including Manchester, Liverpool, Doncaster, Canada and more. I found one forum that is dedicated to sharing photos of your wife. The amount of people who would have clicked on those links and saved them all over the world... there could be thousands.”
Wales on Sunday has decided not to publish the name of this website in order to protect the identity of victims and to avoid publicising it. However, when we visited the website we were presented with links to hundreds of forums. In these forums people can be seen sharing intimate pictures of women without their knowledge and consent. People can also be seen requesting images from other website users, which are commonly intimate pictures of women either taken or shared without their knowledge and consent.
One man boasted about his girlfriend wearing a mask over her eyes while he took intimate pictures of her, which he could share without her knowledge or consent. There were even requests for the intimate pictures of named women. One forum was dedicated to “unaware girl pics”, while another was dedicated to ex-girlfriends. There were many forums dedicated to women from specific countries and local areas, including Wales and parts of Wales.
If the forums on this website weren’t already disturbing enough, pop-ups advertise online tools to alter intimate pictures of women and make them appear more explicit. They use “deepfake” technology to virtually undress individuals, which aim to look realistic.
The advertisement we saw boasted how you can “deepnude” photos in just three easy steps, “enabling users to easily remove clothes from individuals”. The app allows users to create different body types so they can “create images that align with their preferences”.
This is something Katie believes happened to her images. She explained how she previously posted content to an adult subscription based website in 2020 and 2021.
At the time she gave consent for the content to be used in that context; however, she did not give consent for them to be taken or shared anywhere else. She also did not foresee that someone might edit them, making them appear far more explicit than the images she originally posted.
“I was a content creator years ago and never thought it would come back to haunt me,” she said. “I took the account down [years ago] because I felt uncomfortable. One video was 17 seconds long and it was completely uncensored, but when I posted it, I uploaded a completely censored version so you couldn’t actually see any of my body. I had uploaded it with the word ‘censored’ written over [body parts]. I still have one of the original videos saved on my phone so I could see the difference. My camera was good quality, but the camera quality of the uncensored version wasn’t as good and it looked jumpy.”
Since 2023 under the UK Online Safety Act it has been illegal to share deepfaked images. However, it is still not illegal to create them.
Although some of the content Katie found was sourced from her time as a content creator, she said that is not the case for all the photos she saw in her folder. She said: “Some of the images in the folder are from then, but some of the photos in the link I literally couldn’t tell you how they got them.”
Similarly, Katie said many of the women she contacted following the discovery had never used or uploaded content to an adult subscription-based website. She said many had no idea how their images were sourced and shared.
“One girl had a boyfriend at the time and she isn’t sure if she sent the photos to anyone else as it was so long ago,” she said. “Another friend had some photos shared from when she was a minor. She couldn’t even tell me where they got these photos from.”
When Wales on Sunday contacted South Wales Police about the experience of Katie and other women in the force area, a spokesman described how a recent change in the law had allowed them to make vital progress with the investigation.
When Katie first reported the incident to officers in summer 2023, the sharing of intimate pictures and videos of women without consent was not covered by legislation and was therefore legal. This is different to socalled revenge porn which has been illegal since 2015 and requires proving that the perpetrator intended to cause the victim distress.
On February 1, 2024, Section 188 of the Online Safety Act 2023, introduced a new offence into the existing