Meta’s Suit Against Hong Kong Firm Was Just the Beginning – More Companies Linked to CrushAI ‘Nudify’ Apps
Content warning: This story discusses non-consensual deepfake nude imagery.
On the surface, Crushmate appeared to be one of many artificial intelligence “girlfriend” or “companion” apps. Its multiple websites said it specialised in “crafting the AI girl of your dreams”, and on Google and Apple’s app stores, it was described as an “AI chat product designed to provide users with a comprehensive emotional support and communication experience”.
But ads linked to the app on popular social media platforms showed it was offering an entirely different service – making nonconsensual nude images of real women.
Meta announced last week that it was suing Joy Timeline HK Limited (“Joy Timeline”), the Hong Kong-based company it said was behind a group of deepfake “nudifying” apps under “CrushAI”, which include Crushmate. This was following a 404 Media report in January that CrushAI had bought thousands of ads on Instagram and Facebook, using multiple fake Facebook profiles to evade Meta’s moderators.
However, a Bellingcat investigation has uncovered two additional companies in Hong Kong and China – Soul friendship HK Limited (“Soul friendship”) and Wuhan Ruisen Zhuoxin Network Technology Co., Ltd (“Wuhan Ruisen”) – that appear to have links to these apps.
The CrushAI ads showed women, including celebrities and influencers, having their clothes artificially removed using deepfake technology. They led to pages prompting users to upload photos of people and “erase clothes” off them.
404 Media’s report prompted Illinois Senator Dick Durbin to write to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about CrushAI’s advertising on Meta’s platforms, in a letter pointing out that “the generation and dissemination of nonconsensual, deepfake intimate imagery are acts of abuse and violations of privacy that inflict lasting harm on victims”.
Asked about the two other companies Bellingcat has linked to CrushAI, Meta said it was looking into them and would take action, including legal action, as necessary if it found violations of its policies. The company also said they will continue to take the necessary steps against other advertisers who abuse their platform.
Soul friendship was the listed developer of Crushmate on the Apple App Store, while Wuhan Ruisen filed an application for a US federal trademark related to the Crushmate brand last year. Documents supporting Wuhan Ruisen’s trademark application suggest that the app earned more than US$45,000 in subscriptions between December 2023 and July last year.
The complaint, which Meta provided to Bellingcat, shows that the social media giant is seeking an injunction to prevent Joy Timeline from placing ads on its platforms, as well as to claim back US$289,200 in costs spent to investigate and remove ads the company placed for the CrushAI apps. The complaint stated that the Hong Kong company placed over 87,000 violating ads placed on Facebook and Instagram as of February this year, mainly targeting users in the US, Canada, Australia, Germany and the UK.
In response to Bellingcat’s queries, a Crushmate representative said that the app had permanently shut down but had “very briefly relied on the support of many third-party partners” in the early stages of its business.
On the relationship between CrushAI and Joy Timeline as well as the two other companies the representative said that “since the project has now ended and the team no longer exists, I’m unfortunately unable to verify whether the company you mentioned in your email was one of our former partners”.
Neither Soul friendship nor Joy Timeline responded to multiple requests for comment on their relationships with each other or with CrushAI.
Joy Timeline
Like other notorious AI nudify apps, CrushAI appears to own multiple websites with the same domain name (“crushmate”) but different extensions such as .site .net .vip and .us. Bellingcat found at least 23 domains that used the Crushmate name, all of which are no longer accessible. These were mostly registered on two days in April and July 2024. We also found other sites with identical homepage layouts and content to Crushmate, with similar domains like “Crushai”, “crushh”, “crrru”, “crushx” and “crush1”.
Using Domain Tools, we were able to link these sites – and more – through an identical Google Analytics Tag, which is used to track website traffic.
While nearly every one of these websites had their WHOIS registration info redacted for privacy, one was not, and it was registered to Joy Timeline.
Our search on Whoxy, a reverse WHOIS search tool, found 158 domains registered publicly to Joy Timeline at the time of publication. Only one carried the Crushmate name, but 28 more had almost identical layouts and also appeared to be deepfake “nudify” apps.
For example, archived versions of the main pages of two of these domains, “sparkaifun [dot] online” and “chatnplay [dot] online”, were identical to the home page and “clothing eraser” pages on CrushAI’s sites.
It is possible that there are more similar web domains that did not show up in our searches, as domain registrants can also choose to redact their information. Other active domains owned by Joy Timeline, according to publicly accessible domain information, include homepages for other “AI chat” apps, photo editing apps, and mobile games, among others.
On Hong Kong’s Companies Registry, Joy Timeline’s director was listed as a person called Zhang Xiao, who holds a Chinese passport.
The company was registered with 100 shares issued at a total value of HK$100 (US$12.80). Zhang Xiao was listed in the company documents as owning 90 of these shares, while another Chinese national, Zhang Shiwei, owns 10.
Zhang Shiwei is the director of Soul friendship, which Bellingcat’s investigation has also linked to the CrushAI apps.
Soul friendship
Although Crushmate is no longer available on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store, archived versions of its app listings on both of these stores led us to Soul friendship, another Hong Kong-based company.
Crushmate’s developer on Google’s Play Store from September 2024, based on a cached version of the page, was listed as “LipLip Team”. Our online searches of LipLip Team showed that it had another app listed on the Play Store called “LipLip – Live Video Chat&Meet”, which appeared to be a chatting app.
Bellingcat could not find any company called “LipLip Team” registered in Hong Kong, where LipLip-Chat’s archived X bio stated that the app is based.
But the URL of 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 X bio, included the ID “hk.soulfriendship.chat” – our first clue that another company was involved.
On the Google Play Store, the app ID which makes up part of the URL is based on the package name of an app, which uniquely identifies the app across the Play Store. The package name could be set to anything, as long as it is not used by any other app on the Play Store.
However, in this case, it happens to closely match the name of Soul friendship, the Hong Kong-based developer that published both Crushmate and LipLip-Chat on the Apple App Store.
We were able to find more information on Soul friendship by viewing LipLip-Chat’s Apple App Store listing as it would appear from a country within the European Union.
Due to the EU’s Digital Services Act, Apple is legally required to verify and display more detailed information for traders distributing apps in the EU than in other jurisdictions.
This includes developers’ Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number – a nine-digit number key for uniquely identifying companies worldwide – as well as contact information such as their address, phone number and email address.
Even from outside of the EU, it is easy to view this information by tweaking the country code in the URL of the web-based App Store listing.
For example, the developer information visible on the US app store listing for LipLip-Chat only shows Soul friendship’s name. But simply changing the country code from “us” to “nl” (the Netherlands’ country code) 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 one on Joy Timeline’s domain name registration records. This address is also listed as belonging to one of the 6,900 or so Trust or Company Service Providers (TCSPs) in Hong Kong which are authorised to provide, among other corporate services, a registered business or office address.
Documents from the Companies Registry in Hong Kong show that Zhang Shiwei is Soul friendship’s listed director.
Although they have different names and directors, their shareholders are the same and there are multiple overlaps in how Soul friendship and Joy Timeline operate.
Like Joy Timeline, Soul friendship was registered with 100 shares issued at a total value of HK$100. In a mirror of the arrangement for Joy Timeline, Zhang Shiwei, the director of Soul friendship, owns 90 of Soul friendship’s shares while Zhang Xiao, the director of Joy Timeline, owns 10 shares.
In addition to their common TCSP-linked address in Wan Chai, both companies used the same registered office address in Kwun Tong, an industrial and business area in Hong Kong, on their business filings. This is the address of another TCSP, which serves as the company secretary for both of these businesses.
Searches for Soul friendship and Joy Timeline online did not turn up much, except websites under their names that used identical templates. Neither website mentioned Crushmate or CrushAI, and both said on their “About Us” page that they were founded in 2022 and provided “IT consulting and software development services”.
Wuhan Ruisen Zhuoxin Network Technology
To complicate things even further, Bellingcat found two US federal trademark applications filed for Crushmate by Wuhan Ruisen in August 2024. The first application, in the category of “Advertising, Business, and Retail Services”, was rejected on the grounds that the company did not provide sufficient evidence of using the Crushmate mark in commerce.
However, the second one, in “Computer and Software Products and Electrical and Scientific Products”, was officially registered with the trademark office on April 29, 2025. The documents filed for federal trademark applications are publicly accessible through the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)’s website.
In their trademark applications, Wuhan Ruisen provided “specimens”, which are samples of how their trademark is used in commerce. These included screenshots of both Crushmate’s Google Play Store and Apple App Store listings – showing LipLip team and Soul friendship HK as the app developers – as well as screenshots of their website.
John Halski, a US-based lawyer whose practice focuses on trademark and copyright, told Bellingcat that it is possible for a company to include samples or specimens in their trademark application from a different company through a third party licence.
However, Halski said that whether multiple company names in an application would be questioned depended on the examiner.
“The [trademark] examiner has the discretion to ask: ‘You sent me this specimen showing that party XYZ is using it and you claim that your name is ABC’. Then they may ask, ‘is this under a licence arrangement?’”
Anyone may file an application for a trademark, whether or not they own it, but other parties may oppose the application – such as if they are claiming to be the original owners of the trademark – within 30 days after it is published. Wuhan Ruisen’s application for the Crushmate trademark was published on March 11 this year, and successfully registered without opposition on April 29.
The application documents included a screenshot of a dashboard that appeared to show a Stripe payment dashboard, with 4,563 successful payments. All of the visible payments were for US$9.99, which was the weekly cost of a VIP subscription to Crushmate on the US site at the time the application was submitted.
Assuming the only payments recorded by the dashboard were for these subscriptions, this would imply that by the time of the application being submitted in August last year, Crushmate had earned at least US$45,584.37 in subscriptions. It is unclear what the exact timeframe captured by the screenshot of this dashboard was, although the application states that the first use of the trademark was Dec. 25, 2023.
Another screengrab included in the application, also apparently from Crushmate’s Stripe dashboard, showed a breakdown of the locations of Crushmate’s paying customers. This view on Stripe’s dashboard displays the “tax thresholds” for each state in the US and shows whether the income generated has reached taxable status. The screengrab indicated that Crushmate had paying customers across the US, with the most transactions from Kentucky and Utah.
Based on documents from China’s official business registry which match the company’s name in Chinese and address, Wuhan Ruisen was established 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 in these documents as they do not appear on Soul friendship or Joy Timeline’s business registration records in Hong Kong.
A search for the company’s name on China’s Internet Content Provider licence database shows that it registered for five different domain names. Only one was accessible as of June. This site, which describes the Wuhan company as a “professional software development company” focusing on the development of desktop and mobile software, lists a number of apps supposedly developed by the company. Crushmate or any of the CrushAI apps were not among them.
Some of the apps on this page have a close resemblance to software by 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 by a German startup that does not currently offer paid plans in mainland China.
On third-party consumer service platform Heimao Tousu, there were more than 40 complaints between October 2023 and March 2025 about the company. Most said they paid between 29 and 69 yuan (US$4 to US$9.50) to download software they believed to be genuine, only to discover the products were fake or did not work. When they asked for refunds, they were ignored.
Wuhan Ruisen did not respond to multiple emails requesting for comment, and when we called the phone number listed on its website, we got an automated message stating that the number dialled was invalid.
Taking It Down
Crushmate’s X profile and a US domain site carrying its name was accessible until April. That same month, the US Take It Down Act, which criminalises the distribution of non-consensual deepfake pornography at the federal level, passed. It was signed into law in May, and Crushmate’s X profile was deleted sometime that month.
At time of publication, all 23 of the Crushmate domains, the additional nudify-related domains owned by Joy Timeline, and the other CrushAI domains appear to be either offline or display an “under maintenance” notice after users register and log in.
When Bellingcat reached out to a support email listed on several Crushmate websites, an unnamed individual responded.
This person said the decision to shut down operations and disband the team actually took place “several months” before the introduction of the Take It Down Act.
“Since then, this inbox has remained inactive,” they said.
The person emailing us did not explain why they were replying from an inactive account, or respond to subsequent questions about who they were or what their role in Crushmate or CrushAI was.
Joy Timeline has purchased domains as recently as May 14, but none of these appear to be nudify sites or currently hosting content.
Featured image credit: Reihaneh Golpayegani / Telling Tales / Licensed by CC-BY 4.0
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