A warrant has been issued for a man arrested in a Gold Coast apartment over obscene images alleged to be deepfakes.
Anthony Rotondo, also known as Antonio, had been given a notice to appear in Brisbane Magistrates Court on Feb. 15 on nine charges of obscene publications and exhibitions.
Each charge alleges the 54-year-old “knowingly and without lawful justification or excuse publicly distributed an obscene computer-generated image”, according to court documents.
Rotondo was charged about two weeks ago with the offences alleged to have occurred the day before his arrest in October.
Officers apprehended him sitting at a table with a laptop in a Southport apartment after detectives received a complaint that a Brisbane school had been sent an email that included deepfake images of students and teachers, police said.
Detectives uncovered similar incidents at other facilities and businesses in Queensland’s southeast, they added.
Rotondo is facing 18 charges in Southport Magistrates Court.
He has also been fined for contempt after refusing to remove intimate deepfake - or digitally manipulated - images of Australian public figures he had posted online.
In those proceedings the eSafety Commissioner took Rotondo to the Federal Court after he replied to a removal notice, saying it meant nothing to him as he was not an Australian resident.
“Get an arrest warrant if you think you are right,” he added.
After a court ordered Rotondo to remove images and not share the pictures, he emailed them to 50 addresses including those of the eSafety Commissioner and media outlets.
The commissioner started Federal Court proceedings nine days after police found Rotondo had travelled from the Philippines to the Gold Coast.
He later admitted the contempt, with the images being taken down after Rotondo voluntarily provided passwords and other information for the commissioner’s officers.
“The history of the matter suggests that, were he still at liberty and perhaps in another country, he would not have been so accommodating,” Justice Roger Derrington said, ordering Rotondo pay $25,000 and the commissioner’s costs.
The Federal Court proceedings have been stayed until a case management hearing on May 13.
Magistrate Julian Noud ordered Rotondo be arrested and brought to Brisbane Magistrates Court after he failed to appear on the new charges on Feb. 15.
The Southport court charges are due to be mentioned on March 21.
