Hunter Moore gloried in being a life-ruiner and was notoriously unrepentant. When one of the woman who appeared on his site met him in his driveway and stabbed him in the shoulder, he laughed it off and posted photos of the wound online. When Facebook’s lawyers sent him a cease-and-desist for using screenshots from their site, he responded by emailing them a photo of his nether regions. Later called “the most hated man on the Internet” by Rolling Stone, he first came on my radar over three years ago for creating IsAnyoneUp, a porn site that featured naked selfies juxtaposed with Facebook profile shots. Visitors then knew exactly who they were looking at and how to contact them. When I interviewed him, I found him and his justifications for how he made his living both fascinating and horrifying.
Moore, 27, said some photos were self-submitted by wannabe porn stars. Many photos were “revenge porn,” sent in by angry exes; though the revenge porn victims could go after the person who violated their privacy by sending the pics, Moore gleefully cited as protection a law that protects sites like Facebook from getting sued for what users post. Some people who appeared on the site made the implausible claim that they’d taken nude photos but never sent them to anyone; they said they’d been hacked. Moore said all of the people on the site were there because of their own actions, and that he was just profiting — to the tune of $8,000 to $13,000 a month in advertising dollars — from their bad decisions.
In 2012, after nearly two years and thousands of Nakedbook photos, Moore abruptly shuttered IsAnyoneUp, selling it to the owner of an anti-bullying site who said he was willing to pay to make it go away. In a farewell letter, Moore sounded contrite, like Darth Vader putting his light saber away and forsaking the Dark Side. The Village Voice said he was closing it for a different reason, though, reporting that Moore was under investigation by the FBI. The Voice was right. On Thursday, Moore was arrested along with Chris “Gary Jones” Evens and charged with hacking and conspiracy to hack. Moore being his usual self was cavalier about the arrest on Twitter.
An indictment from the FBI’s LA bureau suggests the market price for nude pics is low. Moore allegedly offered Evens $250 for naked photos of “6 guys and 6 girls.” Evens, a 25-year-old from Studio City, California, allegedly hacked into people’s Gmail and Yahoo email accounts — a tried and true method — and grabbed photos from there, even allegedly managing to circumvent Google’s two-factor authentication with some social engineering.
