He Started A Revenge Porn Portal And Pretended It Was All Good. Who Is Hunter Moore, The Most Hated Man On The Internet?

There is nothing one should fear as much as a determined mother. Hunter Moore, who has been called the most hated man on the Internet by the media for more than a decade, experienced it firsthand. That's exactly the name of the documentary miniseries on Netflix, which, in three parts, shows how Moore became famous and rich by abusing loopholes.

At the same time, the series shows viewers what kind of fanatical fans he had, how the first website for publishing revenge porn was created and how he finally ended up behind bars. Behind the series The Most Hated Man on the Internet are the creators of the documentary The Tinder Swindler. They also managed to film interviews with Moore's victims and with the member of the FBI who investigated the case. It also features his ex-girlfriend, who admits that her biggest regret is not having intervened sooner.

Professional destroyer of lives

Hunter Moore was 24 years old when he founded the website Is Anyone Up? It is one of the first websites in the world where people uploaded intimate photos of their ex-partners. This form of revenge, called revenge porn, was not illegal in the United States in 2010. The rules and laws that regulate the protection of privacy and the dissemination of sexual content without the consent of people in photos and videos began to be adopted by countries only later.

Page Is Anyone Up? was also special in that the leaked or stolen nude photos were supplemented by civilian photos and links to the social networks of the women in the photos. This means that they published to the victims not only a topless photo, for example, but also their full name, hometown, Facebook profile and several other photos by which anyone could recognize them. According to the documentary, it cost some people their relationships or jobs, and forced many to withdraw from social networks.

The victims felt shame, they were troubled, and the mental discomfort was deepened by the hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of hateful comments that ran under each post. In the documentary, one of the women describes how she attempted suicide because of the trauma the website caused her.

Users insulted the women in the photos if they happened to have children, openly criticized them for it and said that they should lose them. The king of this toxic place was Moore, who built an aura around himself as an untouchable internet troll. His fans called themselves "the family" and, according to the Twitter posts they show on Netflix, they literally adored him. They called him god or their father and said they were willing to do anything for him, some even murder.

The site's popularity grew and Moore successfully turned it into a source of income, earning thousands, and at its peak, tens of thousands of dollars a month. Rolling Stone magazine once called Moore the most hated man on the planet, and according to The Guardian, he described himself as a professional destroyer of lives and compared himself to Manson. There were more and more invitations to interviews in the media, while at the same time, very few people paid attention to women on the web, describes the mother of one of the victims of this cyberbullying in the series.

Moore didn't take anyone seriously, so he didn't flinch when Laws and her daughter Kayla asked him to take Kayla's photos off the web. He mostly ignored these requests or just laughed at them. He defended himself by saying that he himself is innocent: he does not know the victims on the web, and in fact they were harmed by the people who uploaded the photos to him. In several interviews, he blamed the victims and claimed that they would not have taken nude photos if they did not want the photos to end up on the Internet and available to everyone.

Pornhub, for example, is facing lawsuits today for similar problems, as it fails to prevent videos that someone publishes out of revenge or that contain children with the huge amount of uploaded videos.

But the problem with Moore ran deeper. As an FBI investigation later revealed, some of the photos were stolen. For this, Moore hired a smart young hacker, Charlie Evens, who he paid to hack into the private accounts of strangers and steal anything intimate he found there. It was Charlotte Laws who was the first uncovered the vile lie, who brought the case to the media and to the investigation table of federal agents.

The image of a cheeky boy did not work on TV

Laws contacted 40 victims in the first weeks after her daughter's photos were published. She did a comprehensive survey and found that 40 percent of them have never sent their intimate photos to anyone. They had them stored in e-mails, for example, but they did not share them with other people. At the same time, shortly before the publication, their email account was hacked, they had to reset their password to get into it. And in the case of each of them, a second password reset backup account was added, which Laws suspected of stealing the photos.

This is how she first managed to get back her daughter's photos (since they violated the law of intellectual property) and later, after gathering evidence, accused Moore of hacking, which, unlike the publication of nude photos, was already illegal in the US at the time.

Although Moore took down Kayla's photo after a threat from his lawyer, he did not stop with his "work". He became so famous that they started inviting him to television shows. He damaged his name the most during an interview with Anderson Cooper in 2011. Cooper tried to get him to say that he was at least slightly sorry that his site was hurting people. There he first encountered massive disapproval, as his always cheerful and light-hearted nature did not sit well with the audience. He said in a mocking tone that he was innocent and not doing anything wrong, just having fun.

Over time, presenters began to call victims to the studio, to whom Moore refused to apologize live. He blamed them for their intimate photos being online and claimed that he does not regret his actions. When he had such a "duel" with Charlotte Laws, who called what happened to her daughter a cyberrape, Moore disputed the hacking claim, saying that Kayla must have sent the photo to hundreds of men and one of them got angry. Although rock fans did not abandon him, he began to encounter more and more critical comments on himself and on the page Is Anyone Up?

His ego wouldn't let him stop

The website was later sold by Moore to James McGibney in 2012 at a discount. Threatened with going to jail because there were pictures of underage girls on the web, he succumbed to a man who really just wanted to stop online bullying. McGibney redirected the domain to Bully-ville, an anti-bullying website.

However, Moore did not stop his activity. The fans did not leave him and they waited to see what he would do next. Twitter suddenly seemed boring without his posts, some of the people in the documentary describe. His website was a huge part of the Internet, so Moore began to say that he was far from finished.

He said that the sale was a premeditated move and that he will soon launch a new version of the website, which will also include addresses and maps of the victims' homes. So that anyone who finds their photos will immediately have instructions on how to find specific women. He threatened McGibney that he would hurt his wife and was angry with him for letting himself be fooled.

However, the launch of the new website was prevented by an attack by the Anonymous group. They hacked Moore's bank account and transferred money to an organization that helped abused women, declared him dead in the state of California, and even sent artificial penises to his home. Is Anyone Up? 2 was never launched after all.

However, the real heroine of the series is Laws. She did much of the investigative work and didn't stop even when she achieved peace for her family. She risked attacks from fanatical fans and withstood their pressure online, and it was probably mainly thanks to her work that Moore finally ended up in prison. To this day, she is dedicated to the fight against pornography out of revenge, in 48 American states she was part of the advisory bodies that finally proposed laws to protect privacy and against the abuse of intimate photos.

The most hated man on the internet has finally accepted a plea deal. He and his accomplice were convicted of hacking and identity theft. Moore spent two and a half years in prison. In addition to prison, he had to pay a fine of 2,000 euros, undergo a psychological assessment while serving his sentence, and spend three more years under supervision after his release.

Where is Hunter Moore today?

Moore was released in 2017. According to available sources, he is now staying off the media radar. Goodto.com confirms that he is still banned from Facebook, his Twitter account is suspended, but he was still using it for a while.

He mainly added photos from the gym or with his dog. “Look folks, I've done my time behind bars. I am living a peaceful life now, ten years have passed. Some of you love me, most of you hate me. If you want me to apologize, well, I won't. I don't owe anyone anything," he wrote in one of his no-longer-available tweets.

According to Substream magazine, immediately after his release he started a course that helps ex-prisoners re-engage in life in freedom. He started making music, he had one song called Make The Internet Great Again, but he never released an album. However, in 2018 he wrote and published a book called Is Anyone Up? The creators of the documentary approached him for filming, and although he initially agreed, he ultimately refused to act. He never apologized to the victims.