FBI Arrests "Revenge Porn King" Hunter Moore

After today, the nude selfies you send to your boyfriend may be a little safer. The FBI has arrested Hunter Moore, the “revenge porn king” and founder of isanyoneup.com, and his hacking partner Charlie Evens on a 15-count indictment.

The charges range from conspiracy to identity theft, and prove that Moore and Evans built their nudie pic empire on stolen images from personal email accounts and cell phones. Once a jilted ex-boyfriend had submitted the original “revenge” image, Moore would pay Evens to hack into the victim’s personal accounts to round out the humiliation of who knows how many young women.

At Gawker, Sam Biddle also points out that complaining to Moore about stolen nude pictures usually resulted in further humiliation, including the posting of public information online. “When Moore's victims complained,” writes Biddle, “those messages (and personal information) were made public, creating a perpetual sadism machine that drew huge audiences online — impunity was just as much Moore's calling card as naked people.”

Hunter Moore was a particularly brash kind of douchebag, taking glee in the humiliation of “sluts” and women who’d wronged his dudebro bretheren. In 2012, a Rolling Stone profile called Moore “the most hated man on the Internet,” but he continued to make money off of his amateur porn empire despite his reputation.

His brand mostly consisted of porn and drugs, and his readership (mostly teenagers and young adults) ate it up, until recently. Moore was forced to pay $250,000 to an anti-bullying advocate for defamation, and reality TV star Brandi Passante (of Storage Wars) won a smaller suit against Hunter Moore, but only after he sent a photo of his dick to her lawyer in response to Passante’s complaint.

I’d like to think that there is some relief in Moore’s arrest, but there are thousands of other scumbags who love to post risque photos of women who thought they were sending them in confidence. This does, though, set an important precedent for predatory dudes who think it’s okay to hack into their ex-girlfriend’s email account and share private information and naked photos.