The Russian Circle Group

The public FotoForensics service does not permit commercial use. Organizations that violate this policy are shown a message and directed to the commercial Lab service.

Unfortunately, one group of people continues to use the public FotoForensics site to evaluate pictures for commercial purposes. We call them the Russian Circle Group (RCG) because (1) their text is in Russian, (2) GPS coordinates identify locations in Russia and former soviet republics (Ukraine, Belarus, etc.), and (3) they often annotate pictures with red circles.

Since March 2018, this group has repeatedly received warnings about not using the public site for commercial purposes. Rather than moving off of the public service, they have actively worked around the bans and increase their upload rate.

In 2019, we implemented an automated system for detecting and banning content from this group. It catches over 99% of their uploads. We revised the ban rules in 2020 and 2021. This automated banning drastically reduced their upload volume. The volume was reduced from dozens of pictures uploaded daily to a few attempts every few days. Even though the bans have been in place for years, they still try to upload photos every few days.

This tutorial shows some of their pictures and poses the questions: who are they and what are they doing?

NOTE: This training does not include all of the pictures from this group. We have omitted some of the earlier pictures that show very identifiable people, pets, receipts, and financial statements.


Use the arrows at the bottom of the page to navigate through this training. Click on the pictures to view them in a new tab.