The saga of the illegally obtained nude photos of dozens of celebrities has taken a darker turn. According to Reddit administrators, photos of gymnast McKayla Maroney and MTV actress Liz Lee, shared to 130,000 people on popular forum r/TheFappening, constitute child pornography. 
 
 Maroney’s lawyers have confirmed that the illegally obtained photos were taken while the gymnast was underage. The attorneys’ letter, sent to Porn.com and other websites, demands that the images be removed. 
 
 Additionally, Reddit users have been sharing revenge-porn photos of the actress Liz Lee, whose photos were not part of the initial leaks, but were taken and leaked by her boyfriend when Lee was 16. 
 
 The ongoing leak—dubbed #CelebGate, or more distastefully, “the Fappening”—includes naked photos of A-listers including Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton. It’s prompted outrage, and threats of legal actions from the women targeted. It has since emerged that the photos of at least one of the celebrities were taken when they were under 18. 
 
 The Reddit community r/TheFappening has become the main hub for the leaked photos, due to the fact that Reddit is one of the few mainstream websites that isn’t proactively deleting all links to them. In an urgent post, the subreddit’s moderators warn the community that the site’s admins have informed them that Maroney was underage in the photos “and that we quickly need to remove them. 
 
 “If we don’t remove them,” moderator SickOrSane continues, “this subreddit will most likely be banned, very quickly.” 
 
 The moderator also warns against sharing Lee’s photos, which are apparently also being posted on the subreddit. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Redditors have immediately begun to panic, discussing the potential implications of their downloading and sharing child pornography. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Despite the proliferation of child pornography across r/TheFappening—in addition to the stolen intimate photos of adult celebrities—the Reddit admins have chosen not to remove the community, apparently content to let the moderators sort it out instead. They have, however, hidden the forum from r/all, a list of all content on Reddit. 
 
 
 
 
 
 The focus, throughout the subreddit, is the potential ramifications community members may face for possessing child porn. 
 
 Here, redditors respond to Classiest_Erection with step-by-step instructions for how to use software to wipe his hard drive, which ostensibly contains illegally obtained underage nudes. We’re watching a crime being aided and abetted in real time. 
 
 In another instance, notwhoyouthinimnot goes out of his way to proactively encourage redditors to remove all record of their criminal activity. 
 
 Other community members are only too eager to help. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Some are more concerned with the fact that their community may be banned than the fact it’s being used to share flagrantly illegal material. 
 
 The moderators, meanwhile, are joking about the fact that child porn has been found on their community. (The linked photo in the screenshot below is not pornographic.) 
 
 Reddit admins may yet change course and decide to ban r/TheFappening. Even though redditors are using the site to instruct one another how to hide evidence of the child porn they downloaded via Reddit, administrators seem happy to allow the community to exist. 
 
 It still remains unclear how the photos were leaked, though Apple has strongly denied early reports that hackers gained access to them through a vulnerability in iCloud. 
 
 Photo via teuobk/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Fernando Alfonso III ||||| LOS ANGELES (AP) — As federal investigators worked Tuesday to determine who stole and posted nude photos of several female celebrities online, the images continued to be removed from various sites. 
 
 FILE - In this Sunday, March 2, 2014, file photo, Jennifer Lawrence arrives at the Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. A publicist for Lawrence says the actress has contacted authorities after... (Associated Press) 
 
 Copyright complaints apparently prompted the removal of the image from sharing site Imgur.com and rendered links on the social networking site Reddit inoperable in what experts call an online version of "whack-a-mole" that will never fully scrub the intimate photos of Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence and other stars from the Internet. 
 
 Apple said Tuesday that its engineers have determined that hackers breached individual accounts, but didn't obtain general access to a pair of its services, iCloud and Find my iPhone. While the tech giant released the results after it said it conducted 40 hours of investigation, law enforcement inquiries likely will take days or weeks to complete. 
 
 The FBI offered no details Tuesday on its efforts to identify the people responsible for stealing the images and posting them, but said on Monday that the agency was aware of the breach and was "addressing the matter." Previous investigations have involved the use of search warrants and digital forensics to determine how hackers obtained everything from Paris Hilton's contact list to nude photos of actresses Scarlett Johansson and Mila Kunis. 
 
 Lawrence, a three-time Oscar nominee who won for her role in "Silver Linings Playbook," contacted authorities after the images began appearing Sunday. By Tuesday, a Reddit thread that had been compiling links to images of nude photos of Lawrence and other celebrities had been disabled "due to a copyright claim." Users reported difficulty finding working links to the images on other sites, although they remained active on sites that specialize in online piracy. 
 
 Representatives of Twitter, Reddit and Imgur did not respond to messages Tuesday. Apple said it was cooperating with the FBI and urged users to adopt stronger passwords and enable the two-step authentication feature to prevent. 
 
 Naked images purporting to be of other stars also were posted, although the authenticity of many couldn't be confirmed. 
 
 Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor who specialized in computer crimes, said investigators will focus on not only who's responsible for the theft of the photos, but the tools they used and even the idiosyncrasies of how they program. 
 
 "There is a digital trail," Rasch said. "What you hope for (is) the people aren't very good at what they do, that they screw up, that they (upset) other hackers. Or that they leave a trail." 
 
 While investigations may span months — and different continents — Rasch said sometimes authorities will catch an early break or get a tip that leads them to suspects. The investigations are difficult, he said, but "It's equally difficult to get away with it scot free." 
 
 In the past decade, federal prosecutors have successfully prosecuted a Massachusetts teenager who hacked Hilton's phone account and posted her contact list online, as well as a Florida man who stole nude photos of Johansson, Kunis and singer Christina Aguilera. The teenager was sentenced to several months in jail, while a federal judge in 2012 ordered Christopher Chaney imprisoned for 10 years for the hack that targeted Johansson. 
 
 The people responsible for stealing the Lawrence photos may also be tracked by private investigators who can operate faster than government agents, said Rasch, whose company Rasch Technology and Cyberlaw has conducted similar investigations but is not working on the current data breach. 
 
 Lawrence and other stars who were hacked are now confronting on a very personal level a problem that has dogged the entertainment industry for years — online piracy. 
 
 "Even if you can get it taken down, it's likely to pop up somewhere else," said F. Jay Dougherty, a law professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles who specializes in entertainment and intellectual property issues. 
 
 Mickey Osterreicher, a media lawyer and general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, said that while a successful copyright complaint could scrub the images from a site forever, Lawrence and other celebrities will have to remain vigilant and continue filing takedown notices. 
 
 "You have to go to each place," he said. "It's kind of like playing whack-a-mole." 
 
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 Associated Press writer Mae Anderson in New York contributed to this report. 
 
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 Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP ||||| The FBI and Apple Inc. said they are looking into reports that someone stole nude photos of celebrities and posted the racy images online. 
 
 The photos, which included several of actress Jennifer Lawrence, circulated on various websites and social media platforms Sunday. A publicist for "The Hunger Games" star called the published photos a “flagrant violation of privacy.” 
 
 The photos first surfaced on the image-based online bulletin board 4chan, according to BuzzFeed. 
 
 Apple said Monday in a statement that it is “actively investigating” reports that the photos were stolen from its iCloud service. Apple did not say whether its service, or celebrity iCloud accounts, were breached. 
 
 “We take user privacy very seriously,” Apple spokeswoman Nat Kerris said. 
 
 The FBI confirmed Monday that it is aware of the hacking allegations and is “addressing the matter.” The agency declined to comment further. 
 
 In a major breach of privacy, a hacker leaked a series of pictures allegedly showing Jennifer Lawrence and other female celebrities in the nude. In a major breach of privacy, a hacker leaked a series of pictures allegedly showing Jennifer Lawrence and other female celebrities in the nude. SEE MORE VIDEOS 
 
 Although Lawrence's publicist said the photos of the star were stolen, other celebrities, including actress Victoria Justice, said the photos were fake. 
 
 It remained unclear how the photos were obtained. 
 
 In 2012, Christopher Chaney, 36, of Jacksonville, Fla., was sentenced to 10 years in prison for hacking into the email accounts of more than 50 people in the entertainment industry to gain access to nude photos and private information. 
 
 Chaney's victims included Mila Kunis, Scarlett Johansson and Christina Aguilera. 
 
 Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images Provocative photos of Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence were leaked online Sunday in what appears to be a sizable breach pulled off by a hacker or hackers. Provocative photos of Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence were leaked online Sunday in what appears to be a sizable breach pulled off by a hacker or hackers. (Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images) 
 
 Chaney admitted taking their email addresses, clicking on the “Forgot your password” feature and then resetting the passwords by correctly answering security questions using information he found by searching the Internet. 
 
 Follow me on Twitter @khouriandrew 
 
 Staff writer Louis Sahagun contributed to this report.
– Some Internet users who started out gleeful about the leak of celebrities' nude photos are now busy trying to scrub their hard drives of child porn. Lawyers for McKayla Maroney, who turned 18 in December, say the Olympic gymnast was under 18 when the photos of her were taken and demanded that porn websites remove the images, reports TMZ. Maroney had initially tweeted that the photos were fakes. At Reddit, users of a forum that has been used to share leaked pics have been warned that some pictures of Maroney and MTV star Liz Lee were taken when they were underage and if they're not deleted, "this subreddit will most likely be banned, very quickly." The warning was followed by panicked discussion of how to erase the images, reports the Daily Dot, which describes efforts to advise users how to "remove all record of their criminal activity" as the "aiding and abetting" of a crime. The Prostate Cancer Foundation, meanwhile, has decided to return thousands of dollars donated by users of the same subreddit as "guilt money" for viewing the celeb photos, rather crudely " in honor of Jennifer Lawrence " (Gawker has the explanation here). "Guys, we're literally worse than cancer," one user wrote after the donations were returned, as per the Washington Post. (Apple says the leak wasn't a result of "any breach in ... iCloud or Find My iPhone.")