Revenge porn site operator Hunter Moore pleads guilty to hacking, ID theft
Moore, once deemed the “most hated man on the Internet,” ran IsAnyoneUp.com. — On Wednesday, Hunter Moore, 28, the notorious founder and operator of revenge porn site IsAnyoneUp.com pleaded guilty [PDF] …
Context & Ripple Effects
Hunter Moore built IsAnyoneUp.com into the emblem of the revenge-porn economy before federal prosecutors indicted him and alleged accomplice Charles 'Gary' Evens on 15 counts spanning conspiracy, unauthorized computer access, and aggravated identity theft. The plea converts what had been a moral controversy into settled criminal liability for hacking as the acquisition method — not merely hosting stolen images.
The plea lands amid a widening enforcement arc: weeks earlier the FTC shut down a revenge-porn operation without imposing a fine, and within months another operator would receive nearly 18 years in a first-of-its-kind prosecution, showing courts treating these sites as criminal enterprises rather than speech platforms.
First-order effects
- Moore faces sentencing on the hacking and identity-theft counts — he was later handed two and a half years in prison plus a $2K fine — while co-defendant Charles 'Gary' Evens still faces his portion of the 15-count indictment.
Second-order effects
- Operators of similar sites can no longer treat takedowns or civil pressure as the ceiling of risk; the parallel 18-year sentence shows prosecutors pairing computer-crime charges with identity-theft enhancements to reach prison terms far beyond what hosting liability alone would produce.
Third-order effects
- The pattern holds through platform self-regulation and then legislation — ComplaintsBureau's Scott Breitenstein banned revenge porn on his own site after press scrutiny, and by 2026 an Ohio man became the first convicted under the Take It Down Act — marking the shift from ad hoc prosecutions of individual operators to codified federal statutes covering AI-generated imagery as well.
The trend: Nonconsensual-intimate-image enforcement is escalating from FTC shutdowns and one-off hacker prosecutions toward standing federal criminal statutes that reach both operators and sharers.