Hunter Moore didn’t set out to ruin women’s lives as a career, but he wholeheartedly embraced the role as the proprietor of IsAnyoneUp.com. For 16 months beginning in 2010, Moore’s website served as the prototype for “revenge porn,” the term used to describe the posting of intimate images and videos of any individuals without their consent by jilted lovers and exes.
Except, Moore took it one step further, publishing photos and recorded footage of men and women he obtained through hacking. That is what landed him in federal prison for two years.
The stolen images were often accompanied by a victim’s full name and social media profiles so that Is Anyone Up fans could track them down.
At the time, the then-24-year-old Internet provocateur relished the media attention for his refusal to take down any of Is Anyone Up’s lurid content.
“People threaten me with lawsuits every day, which is funny, because it fuels the site,” Moore told The Awl in a November 2011 interview. “The people that get mad hate my site and want to take it down. They send me all this crazy stuff, but at the same time they’re just building content for my site, which just makes me more popular.”
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In 2012, Moore shut down his website and sold the domain to entrepreneur and anti-bullying activist James McGibney, who then redirected it to Bullyville.com, a website that exposes bullies, according to the BBC.
In a letter explaining his decision to turn off Is Anyone Up, which he posted on the website, Moore claimed the task of sifting through submitted content for underage children, reporting people who submitted child pornography and “all the legal drama of that situation” had burned him out.
But Moore’s reckoning was just beginning.
Who Were Moore’s Victims?
At the height of its infamy, Is Anyone Up posted intimate images and videos of more than 40 people, the majority of whom were women, according to The Guardian.
In his 2012 letter, Moore essentially admitted the website was a repository for revenge porn. “And its [sic] crazy to think that the few posts I did with my friends to get back at a few girls that broke our hearts would turn into what it did,” Moore wrote.
The female victims whose images were posted on Is Anyone Up represented a cross section of everyday society, University of Virginia Law Professor Danielle Citron tells A&E True Crime.
“They were teachers, nurses and dental hygienists, among others, who reached out to me back then,” Citron says. “They would tell me they were so desperate, so embarrassed and some of them couldn’t even go back to work.”
Citron is vice president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a group that has successfully pushed for revenge porn laws in 48 states and Washington D.C. She’s also written books on the lack of federal privacy laws governing content shared on the Internet.
“Moore’s primary goal was the shaming of people’s private lives, and then aiding and abetting harassment of them,” Citron says. “With great bravado, he acted in ways that were stunning at the time. What was so unusual was that he was so public and proud of what he was doing: ruining people’s lives for sport.”
Moore also had a financial motive. Moore claimed Is Anyone Up generated thousands of dollars a month in advertising revenue, according to The New Yorker.
Kayla Laws was among Moore’s early victims. In January 2012, the then-24-year-old aspiring actress discovered a topless photo of herself—which she had never shared with anyone—had been posted on Is Anyone Up, Laws’s mother, Charlotte Laws, tells A&E True Crime.
Laws was among the first victims to speak with media outlets, including The New Yorker, about Moore’s invasive attacks.
“She was freaked out,” Charlotte Laws recalls. “She felt violated, ashamed and humiliated. She barricaded herself in her room. She was emotionally battered.”
The Revenge Porn King’s Downfall
When Moore steadfastly refused to take down her daughter’s image, Charlotte Laws launched a personal mission to take him down.
“I called his publicist, I called his attorneys and I even tried to contact his mother,” Charlotte Laws says. “When he didn’t take the photo down, I shifted into P.I. mode to find out everything about him.”
Initially, Kayla and Charlotte Laws tried to get the Los Angeles Police Department to launch a criminal investigation.
“We spoke to a middle-aged detective who asked my daughter why she took a picture like that if she didn’t want it on the Internet,” Charlotte Laws says. “I told the detective she was victim- blaming my daughter. So we went to the F.B.I.”
In the run-up to their meeting with federal agents, Charlotte Laws says she tracked down 40 other victims on Is Anyone Up so they too could provide witness statements.
“I did a survey of each of them,” she says. “About 40 percent of them said they were hacked. We even got proof that some of the people were hacked by the same email address under the name Gary Jones.”
Based on interviews with victims and evidence the FBI obtained with Charlotte Laws’s assistance, federal agents arrested Moore and his accomplice, Chris Evens, the hacker using the Gary Jones alias, in January 2014.
The two men were charged with 15 counts of aggravated identity theft, conspiracy and hacking. The feds alleged Moore regularly paid Evens between December 2011 and March 2012 to hack victims’ emails and steal their private images.
In February 2015, Moore pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated identity theft and aiding and abetting in the unauthorized access of a computer, according to Rolling Stone, which dubbed him ‘the Most Hated Man on the Internet.” He was sentenced to 30 months in federal lock-up and three years supervised release, according to Law 360.
Where’s Hunter Moore Now?
Since his prison release in September 2017, Moore has kept an incognito profile—except for his Twitter account, which states he currently resides in Miami, Florida. Every once in a while, he’ll remind his followers of his infamy.
On July 1, 2022, he tweeted, “I really want to make twitter fun again but [the] cancel culture revolution thing and people are way too sensitive now.” Three days later, he tweeted, “Is Anyone Up!?”
Meanwhile, cracking down on revenge porn is still challenging, says Citron, even though 48 states and Washington D.C. have passed laws criminalizing the act of sharing intimate images without a person’s consent. A federal bill called The SHIELD Act has also failed to pass. That bill, which stands for Stopping Harmful Image Exploitation and Limiting Distribution Act of 2019, would have made it a crime to distribute “private intimate visual depictions with reckless disregard for the individual’s lack of consent to the distribution, and for other purposes,” according to the bill.
“There are over 900 sites that peddle intimate photos and videos,” Citron says. “The bills that have been passed are narrow, only make crimes misdemeanors and are woefully unenforced.”
Moore hasn’t shown any remorse since going to prison, Charlotte Laws adds. “I checked his Twitter a few days ago and he still has the same view and he is not sorry,” she says. “He hasn’t changed his mind set at all.”
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