BBC Panorama exposes a Reddit forum trading South Asian women's images

In August 2022, the BBC's flagship investigative programme Panorama aired a report, 'The Secret World of Trading Nudes,' that exposed a Reddit subreddit built around the trading of leaked and non-consensual intimate images of South Asian women. According to the investigation, the community had grown to more than 20,000 members and hosted in excess of 15,000 images, including thousands of sexually explicit photographs depicting roughly 150 different women, many of them British women of Indian and Pakistani heritage.

The BBC reported that women whose images appeared in the forum were subjected to harassment, blackmail, and threats, and that the cross-border, community-driven nature of the space made it especially difficult for victims to escape. Some of those affected said they had waited as long as eight months for images to be removed, and several reported that their pictures were never taken down at all despite their complaints — a failure of responsiveness at the heart of the investigation's criticism of the platform.

The programme identified the subreddit's moderator, who used the handle 'Zippomad,' as a man named Himesh Shingadia. He claimed the forum had been created to 'appreciate' South Asian women, a characterization the reporting set against the documented reality of non-consensual image-sharing, coercion, and abuse experienced by the women depicted. The investigation also noted that the community had been repeatedly recreated after earlier removals, illustrating how moderation actions could be circumvented by simply rebuilding under a new banner.

The case sat at the intersection of image-based sexual abuse, cultural and community-specific targeting, and the broader problem of platforms hosting non-consensual intimate imagery. It drew particular attention because the victims belonged to a specific diaspora community, where the exposure of intimate images can carry acute social and familial consequences, amplifying the harm beyond the violation itself.

The Panorama report contributed to ongoing pressure on platforms and lawmakers over intimate-image abuse, a problem that has driven legislative responses in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. It also reinforced a recurring criticism of Reddit: that abusive communities can persist, regenerate, and evade removal, and that the burden of getting non-consensual content taken down too often falls on the victims themselves.