Revenge porn site operator Hunter Moore pleads guilty to hacking, ID theft

[Aerosol]

On Wednesday, Hunter Moore, 28, the notorious founder and operator of revenge porn site IsAnyoneUp.com, pleaded guilty [PDF] to unauthorized access to a computer, aiding and abetting unauthorized access of a computer, and identity theft. The charges each carry a maximum penalty of two to five years in jail, though Moore will not be sentenced until a later date.

Moore’s IsAnybodyUp.com became hugely popular for posting nude and sexually explicit photos of people without their permission, and it spawned copycat revenge porn sites like Craig Brittain's IsAnybodyDown.com and Kevin Bollaert’s ugotposted.com. (Brittain was banned from posting any more nude photos of people without their explicit permission in a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in January, while Bollaert was found guilty earlier this month of identity theft and extortion.) Moore’s site at one point allegedly received over 30 million page views and was bringing in about $10,000 in ad revenue per month.

Some of the photos on Moore’s site came from disgruntled lovers handing over their ex’s nude pics (hence the name “revenge porn”), but Moore also pleaded guilty to paying conspirator Charles “Gary” Evens to steal nude photos from victims, often paying Evens up to $200 per week. "To help populate the site with nude photos, defendant aided, abetted, and procured, and willfully caused co-defendant Charles Evens ('Evens') to intentionally access, without authorization, a computer used in interstate commerce belonging to Google by accessing the victims’ e-mail accounts,” Moore’s plea agreement states.

As Ars reported when Moore was arrested in January 2014, Evens compromised hundreds of e-mail accounts through social engineering. "It was not exploiting, to our knowledge, any vulnerabilities in any of these online accounts,” Assistant US Attorney Wendy Wu told Ars last year. "Basically, he was impersonating these victims' friends and was able to get confidential information that would allow him to access their accounts.”

At one point, Rolling Stone deemed Moore the "Most Hated Man on the Internet," writing, "What was really inspired about [isAnybodyUp.com] was that alongside the photos, Moore included the ex's full name, profession, social-media profile and city of residence, which ensured that the pictures would pop up on Google, which further ensured that, in short order, the ex's mom and boss and everyone else would be seeing him or her online, sans skivvies."

Besides a prison term and years of supervised parole, Moore’s plea agreement specifies that the government may delete all the data on Moore’s seized digital devices.

"Moore is currently scheduled to be in court on Wednesday, February 25," a press officer for the Central California US Attorney's Office wrote to Ars. "But there is a strong possibility that his next court appearance will be delayed until March."

In the UK and California, authorities have been trying to crack down on revenge porn with legislation. Earlier this month, England and Wales passed a law making it a criminal act to distribute nude and explicit photos of a person without their permission, and in California a similar year-old law was used in December to convict a man who posted photos of his ex-girlfriend on Facebook.

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