FANZA Lawsuit vs. MissAV: $4.5M Judgment and Seized Domains

In January 2025, Japanese adult video producer Will Co., Ltd., whose content is distributed through DMM’s FANZA platform, won a $4.5 million default judgment against the operators of MissAV in a U.S. federal court and had seven of the site’s domain names seized. The FANZA lawsuit against MissAV, filed in 2020 in the Western District of Washington, ended in a decisive paper victory that has done almost nothing to stop the site from operating.

Who Sued Whom

Will Co. is a Japanese adult video producer whose titles are distributed through FANZA, the adult arm of DMM.com. FANZA blocks foreign traffic, so piracy sites that redistribute the same videos without geographic restrictions compete directly for the audience FANZA cannot legally serve abroad.

MissAV was one of the largest such sites in the world. Before the seizures, it drew more than 300 million monthly visits, ranked among the 60 most-visited websites globally, and sat in Japan’s top 15. It specialized in uncensored Japanese adult videos posted without authorization, alongside a companion site, ThisAV.com, run by the same operators.¹

The named defendants were Ka Yeung Lee, a Hong Kong permanent resident living in Canada, and his Hong Kong company Youhaha Marketing & Promotion Limited. Lee had created ThisAV.com, purchased its domain, and run the operation using servers from Gorilla Servers in Utah and Cloudflare’s content delivery network.²

How a Hong Kong Operator Ended Up in a U.S. Court

Will Co. filed the case in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in 2020 as C20-5802 BHS, before Judge Benjamin H. Settle. The company had sent DMCA takedown notices in June of that year before turning to litigation.²

The defendants argued a U.S. court had no authority over a Hong Kong business, and Judge Settle initially agreed, dismissing the case in June 2021. Will Co. appealed. On August 31, 2022, the Ninth Circuit reversed, finding the operators had deliberately targeted the American market: hosting on Utah servers, using a North American CDN to speed load times for U.S. visitors, English-language legal pages that referenced only U.S. laws, and more than 1.3 million American visits in a single three-month window.² On remand, Judge Settle denied the defendants’ renewed motion to dismiss in April 2023, holding that U.S. courts had a “distinct interest” in adjudicating claims under their own copyright laws while Hong Kong had “little, if any, interest” in doing so.³

After that ruling, the defendants stopped participating.

The $4.5 Million Judgment and the Domains That Went With It

On January 7, 2025, Judge Settle entered default judgment for Will Co. The award was $4.5 million in statutory damages, calculated as $15,000 per work for 300 infringed videos, plus $76,959 in attorneys’ fees and costs, jointly and severally against all defendants.⁴ Will Co. had originally asked for $45 million.⁵

The court also ordered VeriSign, the registry operator for .com domains, to disable and transfer seven domains to Will Co.:⁴

missav.com
thisav.com
myav.com
missav789.com
vassim.com
eightcha.com
fivetiu.com

Each of the seized domains began displaying a multi-language seizure banner warning that the sites had handled “illegally uploaded videos” and had been “confiscated through legal procedures.” The Japanese version directed users to FANZA and noted that paying for legal content funds new production.¹ Battleship Stance, the anti-piracy firm working with Will Co., confirmed the seizures and said further legal action against new domains was already underway.⁶

Why the Site Is Still Online

The seizure barely disrupted service. Within 24 hours, MissAV’s operators redirected traffic to missav.ws, a domain under Samoa’s country-code registry, offering the same unrestricted access. They pulled it off by stripping out the compromised Cloudflare nameservers and switching to nameservers run by their registrar, Namecheap.¹

The .ws domain was later locked under continued pressure from Will Co. and FANZA.⁷ The operators had already registered missav.ai as a backup through GoDaddy, with a listed contact address in Kowloon, Hong Kong.⁸ By February 2026, both the .ws and .ai domains were accessible, with the .ws reportedly restored after its lockdown.⁹

This is the ceiling on the U.S. legal strategy. The .ws and .ai domains sit under the registries of Samoa and Anguilla, where U.S. court orders carry no direct weight; enforcement there would require separate proceedings in local courts.⁹ The site also uses Cloudflare proxying, anonymized registration, and rapid infrastructure rotation, which frustrate enforcement at the server level.¹⁰

Will the $4.5 Million Ever Be Collected?

Almost certainly not. The defendants are in Hong Kong, the named company is a shell, and the operators have shown no willingness to engage with U.S. courts. As of mid-2026, no reporting indicates any portion of the $4.5 million has been recovered.⁶

The judgment’s real utility is leverage. It gives FANZA a documented U.S. ruling to wave in front of registrars, hosts, and CDN providers when pushing them to act against MissAV mirror domains. Without a criminal arrest in a cooperating jurisdiction, seized domains keep getting replaced within days.¹⁰

A Warning for Anyone Searching for the Site

One consequence of the domain chaos is worth flagging even though it sits outside the lawsuit itself. Because MissAV no longer has a stable, verifiable address, users searching for it routinely land on lookalike clones and typosquatted domains run by bad actors. Researchers have documented several categories of abuse tied to these fakes:

SpyNote Android trojans distributed through fake MissAV domains, capable of intercepting SMS two-factor codes, recording calls, stealing contacts, tracking GPS, and overlaying phishing screens on banking apps.¹⁰
Infostealer malware bundled into fake “MissAV downloader” tools for Windows and macOS, including Vidar, RedLine, and Lumma variants that harvest passwords and financial data.¹⁰
Credential phishing on clone sites that mimic login pages, even though the real platform doesn’t require accounts.¹⁰
Cryptomining scripts and “ClickFix” CAPTCHA lures that trick users into running malicious code.¹⁰

There is no canonical MissAV domain as of mid-2026, and the site’s lack of consistent SSL certificates or identity signals means even a working copy cannot be reliably distinguished from a malicious clone.¹⁰

1
TorrentFreak. MissAV, One of the World’s Largest Pirate Sites, Targeted in Takedown Effort
2
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Will Co., Ltd. v. Ka Yeung Lee, No. 21-35617
3
CCH Incorporated. Will Co. v. Lee, Order Denying Motion to Dismiss
4
PACER Monitor. Will Co. Ltd. v. Lee et al., Default Judgment
5
10Beasts. The New Domain .ws of MissAV Has Been Locked
6
TorrentFreak. Court Orders Pirate Site MissAV to Pay $4.5M in Damages, Domains Seized
7
Icon Era. MissAV.ws Domain Locked Permanently
8
Whois.com. Whois Record for Missav.ai
9
CommandLinux. MissAV.ws
10
Plisio. MissAV Profile