Darknet Diaries - Ep 34: For Your Eyes Only

Episode Date: March 19, 2019

Nude selfies. This episode is all about nude selfies. What happens if you take one and give it to a vengeful boyfriend. What happens when a hacker knows you have them and wants to steal them from your phone. What happens is not good. This episode was sponsored by Nord VPN. Visit nordvpn.com/darknet and use promo code "DARKNET".This episode was sponsored by Molekule, a new air purifier that completely destroys air pollutants to help you breath easier. Visit molekule.com to use check out code "DARKNET" to get a discount.For references, sources, and links check out the show notes at darknetdiaries.com/episode/34/.

There's a lot of sexual content in this episode and adult language and themes, so consider this episode explicit. Let's talk about your smartphone. How much does it know about you? It knows when you're sleeping, because you put it down next to your bed in the room that's quiet and dark for eight hours. It knows all the things you say on Twitter, your email conversations, your Facebook messages. And it knows what games you like to play.

But the most personal thing I think it knows about you is what you look like naked. Cosmo magazine conducted a survey on 850 millennial women and 89% of them said they took nude selfies. Now if 9 out of 10 women are taking naked photos of themselves, this could be a problem. These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I'm Jack Recider. This is Dark by Delete Me.

I know a bit too much about how scam callers work. They'll use anything they can find about you online to try to get at your money. And our personal information is all over the place online. Phone numbers, addresses, family members, where you work, what kind of car you drive. It's endless and it's not a fair fight. But I realized I don't need to be fighting this alone anymore. Now I use the help of Delete.me. Delete.me is a subscription service that finds and removes personal information from hundreds of data brokers' websites and continuously works to keep it off. Data brokers hate them because Delete.me Transcription by CastingWords have someone on my team when it comes to my privacy. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now at a special discount for Darknet Diaries listeners. Today, get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeleteme.com slash darknetdiaries and use promo code darknet at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to

joindeleteme.com slash darknetdiaries and enter code darknet at checkout. That's joindeleteme.com slash darknetdiaries and use code darknet. Support for this show comes from Black Hills Information Security. This is a company that does penetration testing, incident response, and active monitoring to help keep businesses secure. I know a few people who work over there, and I can vouch they do very good work. If you want to improve the security of your organization, give them a call. I'm sure they can help. But the founder of the company, John Strand, is a teacher, and he's made it a mission to make Black Hills Information Security world-class in security training. You

can learn things like penetration testing, securing the cloud, breaching the cloud, digital forensics, and so much more. But get this, the whole thing is pay what you can. Black Hills believes that great intro security classes do not need to be expensive, and they are trying to break down barriers to get more people into the security field. And if you decide to pay over $195, you get six months access to the MetaCTF Cyber Range, which is great for practicing your skills and showing them off to potential employers. Head on over to blackhillsinfosec.com

to learn more about what services they offer and find links to their webcasts to get some world-class training. That's blackhillsinfosec.com. blackillsInfosec.com. BlackHillsInfosec.com. Okay, here's the situation. Suppose you're in a loving relationship. You let your boyfriend or girlfriend take a photo of you, and you show some skin, like a lot of skin. You might even let them film yourselves having sex. Sure, why not? It's fun and exciting and you're exploring your own sexuality to see what you're comfortable with. A lot of people do it. No problem. But then one day your relationship goes sour. Really sour.

There's a breakup. It's ugly. Huge fights. Lots of tears. Someone feels betrayed and used and cheated. They're mad. Really upset. And they want to do something to make you feel bad too. Tony Robbins taught me that a core need in a relationship is the need to feel significant. And if a person in a relationship doesn't feel significant, they might lash out at you to bring you down to their level. And they fulfill their need to be significant by creating significant problems. So what might a person like that do? Well, they have your nude photos, maybe even a video of you having sex, and they decide to post it online. Plastering it all over social media, Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Boom. Now your naked body is out there for anyone to see,

and they're sharing it with your co-workers, and your classmates, and your family. All your friends see it too. It's horrible. Now you feel completely ruined. And the laws around this are vague and practically non-existent. I mean, they took the photo with their camera, with your consent, but now years later you want to put restrictions on where they can share that photo? The situation is ugly. This is called revenge porn, and it's been a thing online since Usenet forums back in the 90s. Heck, even in the 80s, there was a section in Hustler magazine that encouraged readers to submit personal photos, and a lot of these photos that were submitted were without the women's permission.

Revenge porn has been getting bigger over time. One guy saw this gaining in popularity and decided to take matters into his own hands. Kevin Bollert. He thought, hey, I bet a lot of people would like to see amateur photos of old boyfriends and girlfriends. So he made a site that lets anonymous users upload revenge porn for anyone to look at. Kevin's site grew in popularity. Some people like seeing amateur pics and real core porn. And since porn already feels secret, looking at photos you aren't supposed to ever see felt even more forbidden, maybe even more exciting. So Kevin's website,

yougotposted.com, was growing bigger and bigger. Hundreds of people were uploading nude pics of old boyfriends and girlfriends, often with horrible descriptions, calling their ex-girlfriend a slut or a whore. And like 90% of the pics are females too. So Kevin's site grew, but when women saw their photos were posted to the site, they would get furious and email Kevin asking for it to be removed. Kevin was willing to remove it, but thought these people were so desperate to have it removed, why not try to get some cash out of them? So Kevin created a second site, ChangeMyReputation.com, where for around $300, you could pay to get your pics removed from YouGotPosted.com. And it was working. People were actually paying to have their images removed. Things were looking good for Kevin.

In the first year of his site being up, 10,000 people submitted nude photos of their exes, and he received thousands of takedown emails, which converted to tens of thousands of dollars in cash. Until December 12th, 2013. That's when the police arrested Kevin. His dream of being a big entrepreneur came to a sudden halt. He was being charged with 31 counts of conspiracy, identity theft, and extortion. During trial, a few of the victims that got their photos posted spoke up and explained how much damage it caused. Here's one victim. I'm homeless because of this. I lost my family, friends. I've lost almost everything because of this. And here's another victim. I tried to commit myself to a mental institution after this happened because I was so overwhelmed. I would spend hours on the floor crying. There were 10,000 victims of revenge porn that were posted

to his site. Even Kevin began crying at some point in the courtroom when he realized how bad his site had hurt people. Once the jury heard all this, they convicted Kevin of 27 felonies, and the judge sentenced him to 18 years in prison. 18 years in prison. Kevin felt remorse and apologized to everyone he's hurt. Kevin never uploaded any images himself, though. He only ran the site to let anonymous people do that. He started the site just to make money, but after one year, YouGotPosted.com was closed down. About this time, a guy named Hunter Moore starts hitting the news. Oh, where do I even begin with Hunter? There is so much to him. Of all the rabbit holes I've ever gone down on the internet, the Hunter Moore story is one of the strangest I've found. He grew up in Sacramento, California, and when he was around 21 years old,

he got a job working at Zoomy's, a trendy clothing store on the mall. But while working there, something happened that I think put him on a trajectory that would define his life. Okay, so he's working in the clothing shop, and he sees that the male manager keeps asking another 16-year-old male co-worker to try on certain clothes. The manager asks Hunter to try on some clothes too, so Hunter puts the clothes on and then comes out of the dressing room. On Hunter's YouTube channel, he explains what happens next. And this is where this episode starts getting explicit. Homeboy comes up to me, the 16 year old. He's like, yo, man, he's like, he keeps making me try

these fucking clothes on. And he's like, I know what he's doing. Like, you know, he was like freaking out. And I'm like, well, what's going on, little dude? and i'm like what's going on little dude like tell me what's up he's like okay look right there look right here and there's cameras by the dressing room dude and he's like he's like he watches us and when we come out or you know like he can kind of see us or whatever and i'm like what the fuck he's like yeah he goes in the office and he jerks off because he can look at all the video and he can edit it and shit like it's on a private server hunter doesn't know what to think about this and goes back to work like normal but the manager would casually pass by hunter and touch him inappropriately so you know as time goes on he's grabbing my ass more one day hunter's ringing a cute girl up at the cash

register and he's hitting on her and the manager's watching him ring her up and i'm talking to the girl i'm like haha yeah yeah he oh what's your name haha well he comes up from behind me right and he comes like real slow like a stalker dude he comes from behind he puts his hands like this boom puts them on my stomach and then goes down to my cock like under my fucking pants like both hands right like he didn't like jerk me off or nothing he just put his hands on my pants and he goes he kisses me on the neck and he goes hunter we all know you're a fag. And then like smiles, dude, and fucking walks away. Initially, Hunter was mostly angry that he lost his chance with this girl.

But then he starts thinking how creepy all this was. And he felt like he wanted to quit. But he kept working to the end of his shift. And after the store closed, he's counting the money in the register. I'm closing out the last drawer. He comes up from me hella creepy like and i'm like the wish motherfucker would dude would just do it like i'm in my paris i see him dude you know i'm like what's up comes up from behind he's like don't be mad and like right when he said meh i went like this yeah and i fucking hit him dude busted his whole shit so he goes back he's like yeah what the hell and then like

grabs me dude throws me against the wall boom wounded right i'm leaking and uh i don't remember anything bum i fall i fall on the floor what happens i'm laying on the floor right well i come to dude and he's dragging me across the floor and i'm like so all i think is he's trying to pull my pants off and rape me dude and so like I just start kicking get off of me so I get up I kick his fat fucking ass off me so I take off the door right I didn't even know I'm bleeding I'm leaking and uh I'm driving home I'm like fuck this fool just trying to rape me and I'm calling everyone I'm on my sidekick this is how old this shit is I'm texting people I'm like yo this fuck this, blah, this guy just raped me, blah, I couldn't even think straight, because now I wouldn't even

tell people that shit, but, duh, dude, I want to kill this guy, so I get home, my friends are at my door, my dad's there, he's ready with a fucking pistol, like, we're ready to go, dude, and then we, you know, we calm down, we're thinking about it, and we're like, yo, why don't we just sue the company? So that's what happened, dude. He finds out that the manager fondled two other employees, too. So he gets these other guys together, and they get a lawyer and sue the manager. They get together with the other lawyers and the mediator and try to sort this case out. So yeah, we get there, and we're talking, we're talking, we tell all of our stories, how it affected us. with the other lawyers and the mediator and try to sort this case out. like $25,000 for all of you. I was like, nah, we're going to court. We'll see them in fucking trial.

Fuck this shit. Fuck this shit. Nah, hell nah. We're losing our minds, dude. We're like, fuck these fools. Like that's what being raped is only worth is 25 grand. Like we were losing our minds, dude. Hunter and his two coworkers wanted more from this and they wanted to see how high they could go. The attorneys came back and offered 50 grand. Nope. A hundred grand. Nope. They wanted more than that. And they kept saying, let's take this to court. The manager's attorney met with them one more time. So they come in, right? And they're like, all right, guys, well, we just want to know how, how it affected you long-term since the situation happened. And so, you know, I tell my story again, same old bullshit. And I'm just, I'm just kind of, kind of whatever, you know, I tell my story against him with bullshit, and I'm just kind of whatever, you know?

Anyway, so Ray tells his story, and he just starts bawling, dude. Like, he touched me. And I know he's not serious, right? So I have my head down like this, like I'm sad. But really, I'm trying not to laugh. And so I get up, right? I'm like this, and I'm sad. But really, I'm trying not to laugh. And so I get up, right? I'm like this. And I'm looking around the room.

And I look at fucking the 16-year-old kid. And we connect the eyes, dude. And I was the hardest fucking thing not to laugh, man. It was fucking horrible. So the lawyers, you know, they're like, okay, thank you. And they walk out the room. They're like, we're sorry this happened to you. You know, telling Ray, like, you know, they're like, okay, thank you. And they walk out the room. They're like, we're sorry this happened to you. You know, telling Ray, like, you know, pat him on the hand and shit.

So Ray, as soon as the door shuts, he goes from, he touched me. As far as I ain't laughing, dude. And all of us in the room, dude, we all just start cracking up. And they come back with that fucking final number, dude. So it all worked. Hunter was awarded $300,000 for this sexual harassment case. But that's not what Hunter's known for. We're just getting started with Hunter.

He had this entrepreneurial spirit and wanted to create his own company or something. But he had no idea what to do. So he took the money and just started partying hard. Like he'd go to Australia for a crazy party or New York and he'd drink a lot and smoke a lot and do a lot of weed and probably even harder drugs. And then he'd come back home and look for the next fun thing to do. Being 22 years old with $300,000 in your pocket,

of course you're going gonna have a little fun. But Hunter didn't know when to stop. He kept hanging out at clubs and spent a lot of his money on lavish lifestyle and partying and girls and music and drugs. He started DJing at some parties too, and he wasn't really that good at it. He barely knew what he was doing for his first gig, and at other gigs he would just play mixes he made like the day before. And he got a lot of tattoos during this time. The first one was across his chest, and it said, Forgive me, I have sinned.

Then he got a tattoo of his mother and his father on his arm, and a lot of religious symbols. He only wore black and white clothing, like black denim pants often, and he seemed to wear shirts that say Obey on them. Some shirts had ornate wings and crosses on them too. He got a good taste of this lifestyle of luxury and fun for a short while and he attracted a lot of women too. One camera followed him around to a club. Here he is talking to women in there. Why are you in love with me?

Because you're hard to get. Hello, you're really pretty. Thank you. What are you doing here tonight? I'm just hanging out. Are you looking for the love of your life? No, I'm not. Why not? What's the deal? Do you have a boyfriend already? No, I just don't want to meet a guy at a club. Well, listen, my girlfriend's here tonight.

I met her at a club. We had sex for the first day I met her. Probably within, I don't know, 20 minutes of meeting her. I thought she was a whore, but... Did you come here tonight to find your significant other? Hell no. Did you come to tonight to find your significant other? Hell no! Did you come to have a one night stand? Yes!

And yeah, whether it was the money or being a DJ or the drugs or just being at so many parties, it was working for Hunter. He was having a blast and getting a lot of women. I think at some point, maybe around five years into this, the money started to run short. In fact, he ran totally out of cash and had negative money in his account. He wanted to make some kind of business, but didn't actually do anything with the time or money he had. But he was introduced to a new lifestyle, which altered the way he sees people. At some point, as things started slowing down, he hooked up with a girl who was sending him a lot of nude photos of herself. He tried to share these photos with a friend, but it didn't work.

His friend convinced him to upload them to a website so he can see it. So Hunter took an old domain he had lying around, called isanyoneup.com, and published those photos there. His friends thought it was cool, and they wanted to publish some photos too. So Hunter gave them the ability to post nude photos of women they're sleeping with too. And this was all just for a laugh between bros, and Hunter really thought nothing of it. But then a short time after that, Hunter checked the stats on the site and saw that 14,000 people had visited the site in just a few weeks.

Hunter thought, whoa, there may be something to this, and decided to turn isanyoneup.com into a site where people can anonymously post nude photos of their boyfriends or girlfriends so anyone can see it. He designed the site with a sort of metalcore flair to it, with gothic-style font and punkish and metal overtones. He built the site and started promoting it. Twitter, Facebook, forums.

He'd get girls at parties to wear shirts with the URL on it. And sure enough, the site rose in popularity fairly quickly. People were posting a lot of nudes from exes or current relationships that anyone could go check out. Hunter took this a step further. And when you post someone's photo, you can also add a link to their Facebook profile. So now when you see a nude photo of someone on there, you can very creepily go check out their Facebook page too. And yeah, this resulted in a major creep fest. Girls who got posted on the site got a lot of really nasty messages, and pretty much all the photos posted there were without the person's permission, which made a lot of people feel extremely violated. Dick pics also showed up on the site, but not just anyone's dick

pics. These were often pics of male band members from the metalcore genre of music. The members of the site found this exciting and got a lot of attention when it happened. I mean, male rockstar sex tapes had their own version of popularity. We had Bret Michaels, Fred Durst, Kid Rock, and Tommy Lee with sex tapes, and this all made big news. So seeing the penises of metalcore band members was kind of a wonder to see. And over time, more and more of these male band member dick pics would show up. It was weird.

But what was weirder is what happened on the site next. Each day there would be a pic of the day and that person would be queen or king of the site for a day, which resulted in them getting a lot of attention for their nude photos. And with links to their Facebook page, this got them a lot of messages. Now some people actually liked this kind of attention. Some girls would post their own nudes just to get a weird sort of affection for the day. And you'd see male band members post dick pics like the same day they'd announced a new album or a tour coming up,

which would give him like a bump in popularity right at the time he needed it. The site took on a very weird cult following and attracted some people with a strange appreciation for Hunter. But there were a lot of people who absolutely hated this. Women who got posted and they got a lot of really creepy messages on Facebook, they complained to Hunter and Facebook about this. Facebook issued cease and desist to Hunter, but Hunter just sent them a dick pic of himself back to Facebook. So Hunter got banned from Facebook for life. I think the same for Twitter too. And I think Facebook blocked any links to isanyoneup.com. And at the same time, this made his fans like him even more. They liked Hunter's unapologetic persona and the way he would respond to hate mail. Because AnyoneUp.com was getting more and more popular,

and Hunter was getting more of a following. In fact, he appeared on the Anderson Cooper show, where Anderson brought in two women whose photos were posted to the site without their consent. Do you feel bad about doing this to... I mean, you don't know these women. You don't know anything about them. Just anonymous people give you the pictures. I mean mean that's kind of what makes it easier you know i mean you know it is all anonymous i don't know these people and uh you know but they're sitting right here i mean do you don't feel any any no i mean no one put a gun to your

head and made you take these pictures it's 2011 everything's on the internet choosing to send them to somebody that we trust like that doesn't mean that we expect them to show up on the internet and you're helping someone who's probably spiteful of a situation exploit someone without their permission and after that he appeared on dr drew's show dr drew had a woman call in whose pics were posted to his site and she complained to Hunter about the pain this caused her. What do you think, Hunter? I don't know how you can point your finger at me. You took the picture. I mean, I've been justifying this in my head for over a year and a half of, you know, the site, you know, what I do and the site that I run. But at the end of the day, it started with you and you took these pictures. I don't know how old you are, but I'm sure, you know, you're smart and go to school. I mean, it's 2012. What Then another person called in and said her daughter's computer was hacked and her pics

were posted to the site somehow. You know, usually people that are embarrassed, who made mistakes, you know, usually try and fall back on something else. I'm sure she sent the pictures to a million different guys and just ended up on my site just like everybody else. And then ABC News caught up with him and interviewed Hunter at his house. Hunter starts explaining that there are so many pictures being uploaded to the site. It never stops. People are submitting all the time. Is anyone up? It's where revengeful exes come for a peace of mind. Your ex-girlfriend who you've done dirty, she can come to my site and we will take care of her. While the term revenge porn has been around before, I think it was actually Hunter who now popularized it.

I mean, here he is talking about it on ABC back in 2012. And I think this is how the term actually became mainstream. And Hunter expressed that he has no empathy for the people that are posted to his site. No, they're just people, they're characters and avatars and icons on a screen. All right. So you might be putting some pieces together at this point and you're like, how is this guy on TV? How is he getting away with this? And the truth is, according to federal law, he was in the clear. It's the people who posted that might be breaking the law, but not actually the place where it's hosted. Hunter had a lawyer and checked all this out, and it was fully legal what he was doing. And you might be wondering, but wait, what about yougotposted.com?

That guy got 18 years in prison. And I'm pretty sure he got that because he was charging people to remove the pics, which is extortion. Hunter told ABC about a story of a victim of the site that came after him. I was walking out of my house one day and out of nowhere, the girl we had posted, or I had posted, she stuck me in the shoulder with a Bic pen. And this is the scar I have left. They had to surgically remove it. All these TV appearances just made his site rise up in popularity even more and more. It was a great boost for his business. He now had 40 to 70 million people a month visiting his site. Some just were curious,

some were victims, some were people submitting stuff, but most people came to look at nude photos. He was making around $30,000 a month on the site just from ads at this point, and it gave him the ability to host lavish parties. He was DJing again and sponsoring some tours for bands. Hunter's lavish lifestyle wouldn't last forever, though. After the break, we'll hear how everything comes crashing down. Stay with us. This episode is sponsored by SpyCloud. Stay with us. criminals have at their disposal, from credentials to cookies to PII. Knowing what's putting you and

your organization at risk and what to remediate is critical for protecting you and your users from account takeovers, session hijacking, and ransomware. SpyCloud exists to disrupt cybercrime with a mission to end criminals' ability to profit from stolen data. With SpyCloud, a leader in identity threat protection, you're never in the dark about your company's exposure from third-party Thank you. The success of IsAnyoneUp.com gave Hunter that party lifestyle that he always wanted, that entrepreneur flair, and he developed a sort of God complex. He was doing a lot of cocaine and drinking gallons of vodka, smoking cigarettes, and trying to get with any woman he found hot. The BBC interviewed him and wrote an article about him calling him the most hated man on the internet. But Hunter just replied by saying

he loves the attention and then he feels like he's giving people a hard lesson on how technology and privacy works in the modern era. I think at this point Anonymous and 4chan started campaigning against Hunter and began submitting a massive amount of child porn to his site. Now Hunter had set it up so he had to approve every photo before it would go on the site. So he had to sit there and look at thousands of child porn photos and animal porn and really brutal porn images. In one interview Hunter said the amount of stuff he has to look at is so overwhelming and endless and horrible but he has to filter out all the illegal stuff and he just doesn't see any way around it. This constant work of keeping the site going and the endless pressure from people to take it down and all the hate he was getting and the way the media portrayed his

site, it led Hunter to do one thing, pull the plug on his own site. After about a year and a half after he launched it, he gave it to another website who changed it to something else. He even got a tattoo to commemorate taking down isanyoneup.com. His tattoo said hated in French, right on the back of his right hand. But Hunter was still addicted to this lifestyle of music and women and drugs, and he kept partying harder and harder. At this point, a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine started following Hunter around to see what he's up to. And that story from Rolling Stone is incredible. I mean, I could go on another hour just talking about that alone, but it has nothing to do with computers, so I'm going to skip it.

But just in case you're curious, he went on a wild party through New York, met a lot of crazy girls, did a ton of drugs, broke some DJ's nose, got knocked out himself, started a huge brawl, and then came back to California. And I even think he tried to get laid and start a fight on the plane ride home. It's really crazy rockstar level stories that I didn't believe when Hunter told it, but because the Rolling Stone reporter said they were there too, I guess it is true. When isanyoneup.com was up, this young woman's topless photo got posted there. I had taken the photos of myself. I had stored them on my computer just for no reason at

all. And that's where they stayed. She claims she never sent them to anyone ever. She says she must have been hacked in order for someone to have posted her photos to that site. Now, actually, a few other people said the same thing, but nobody really believed them. But this young woman's mother was a private investigator. And her mother tried to figure out things for herself. Just to see my daughter in tears over this, and I felt so helpless. She was blaming herself, which is what a lot of victims do. I talked to nine attorneys at the beginning. They did not have a clue about what to do.

This is Charlotte Laws speaking with CNN about what she did with this. And Charlotte started building a file on Hunter, as she created a huge list of victims of the site, compiling it all in a big box of papers. Being a private investigator, she wanted to go check out one of Hunter's parties herself. So in addition to running the site, he would periodically host parties. So I'm locking the door, my car door, and I have this crazy getup on. I have this white pasty stuff on my face, this black wig, this little cap, sunglasses. I mean, I look pretty humorous. And I turn around in the parking lot and the person who's standing there in my face is Hunter Moore. She was bold and brazen and Hunter knew she was after him and would tell his friends

and they'd go to her house and stalk her and try to scare her. But she persisted to build a case on Hunter and eventually found that a lot of victims of the site were claiming to have been hacked too. She compiled a list of evidence and sent it to the FBI who knew that if they could prove that Hunter was hacking they could send him to prison. So the FBI investigated the case and found in fact there was someone hacking into people's accounts and posting it on the site. And his hacker name was Gary Jones. And somehow, this CNN reporter tracked down the hacker and called them on the phone. Here's the hacker talking about working with Hunter. When he hacked into these people, he felt shameless about it. I did it for money.

I mean, again, that makes me sound like a monster, but it's scary how quickly I would drop my morals for so little. You know, how much those women were worth. I mean, it was like 500 a week, 1,000 a week. I mean, it was really just my habit. You have to do all these, like, you know, mental gymnastics to be able to live with yourself. The FBI had enough evidence on Hunter at this point and were ready to take him down. Here's Hunter. I did a show in Buffalo, New York, and I had flown back and I was just at home and I smoked a huge blunt and I was like, you know what?

It's going to be a good year or something. I remember just feeling good and I had my big old fat cat next to blunt and I was like you know what it's gonna be a good year or something I remember just feeling good and I had my big old fat cat next to me and I was just chilling and then it was probably three in the morning like when I fell asleep I woke up about three hours later super high and uh the feds were all standing around me they were like yeah get dressed and I was like what the fuck like i just didn't understand not only was i high and completely out of it i was like i had a god complex at this time too so i you know i was on the top of my game i was making retarded money it was just it just didn't compute in my brain like what the fuck are you guys doing here like it just didn't it was weird man i don't

know how to explain it the fbi arrested hunter and took him to the police station to be processed. He then got to go home and wait for his trial date. For two years, he had to wait. And during that time, he was completely banned from using the internet, on top of already being banned from Facebook for life. Eventually, his trial day came, and Hunter was charged with aggravated identity theft and aiding and abetting to unauthorized access to a computer, which landed him in prison for 30 months and a measly $145 in restitution. Weird stuff happens online. Like, really weird stuff. You know about 4chan, right? At its core, it's just a place where people can upload photos and comment on them, anonymously. But it's like the underbelly cesspool of the internet.

Horrible and grotesque photos are posted there. A lot of porn, too. And it's mixed with gore. It's just awful. Another site similar to 4chan was around at the same time called Anon IB. Again, it was a site that just let you post pictures anonymously. But Anon IB had a section on it that sort of took the place of isanyoneup.com. There was a board just for revenge porn, and that's where people moved to. But then a new board showed up called STOL, Stole. And this board was dedicated to posting stolen photos, mostly nude photos of women. And so people would post nude images they stole from other people's

phones or something. I don't even know what the name of this is. It's not quite revenge porn, maybe stolen porn? Anyways, AnonIB was now becoming the go-to place for revenge porn and also to post stolen nudes. But every now and then, somebody would post a stolen nude of a musician or a celebrity. And these were always crowd favorites, but it was really rare. People who stole celebrity photos didn't post them willfully, but they would trade them privately. And so a really weird underground nude photo exchange started happening. Essentially, if you had an unreleased nude photo of a celebrity, you could trade those for more unreleased nude photos of celebrities. So a small group of people

were doing this on a non-IB, sometimes teasing a little of what they had to the public image boards, but for the most part, keeping it all very hush-hush. Now, how do you think people were getting these unreleased nude photos of celebrities? Was it paparazzi following them into the bathroom or beach? No, not those photos. Those would just be published to TMZ or something. The people on Anon.ib were hacking into the celebrities' accounts. And here's how they did it. First, they did targeted, open-source intelligence gathering on specific celebrities to try to find their email address. This would be doing things like scouring their social media if anyone's posted an email

address there, or googling looking for their email, or searching online databases, or doing something like that. The hacker would try to find out if a celebrity had an iPhone or an Android. You can look at someone's tweets and it often says whether it was sent from an iPhone or not. Because if they do have an iPhone, that means they have iCloud. Now, iCloud is an automatic backup storage for iPhones. Whatever pics you take on your iPhone can automatically get backed up to iCloud. So if you lose or break your phone, you don't lose your pictures, apps, or settings. Now, once the hacker had a celebrity's email address,

they'd make a few fake email addresses for themselves. They'd make addresses like emailprotection at iCloud.com or noreplyhelpdesk at Outlook.com or securehelpdesk at Gmail.com. Stuff like that. Then they'd clone the website for Apple's iCloud login page and host it on their own server. The clone would be a pixel perfect copy. And here's where things get tricky. The cloned iCloud login page did two things. First, when you type in your username and password, it would save that in clear text so the hacker could see it. But then as soon as you click login, it redirects you to the actual iCloud login. So it looks like you just entered the password wrong on your

first try and you just need to try again. It's really slick and tricky to notice. And all this is actually very simple to create using the social engineering toolkit, which is a popular hacking tool designed to social engineer a victim. So now the hacker will send an email to the celebrity claiming to be from Apple's iCloud service and that something went wrong with your account and you need to click here to log in to resolve the issue. And so if a person were to click the link, it goes to the cloned iCloud website and the user types in the username and password. And now the hacker has a login for that celebrity. And once the hacker has the login information, they can use a tool like Elcomsoft to simply copy everything off that iCloud storage account. And when a hacker got into an iCloud account of

a celebrity, they could see all the photos that celebrity has taken with their phone. Vacation photos, pictures of the family, and most importantly for the hacker, nudes. And yes, many celebrities have nude photos of themselves on their phones. Another method these hackers use to hack into iCloud accounts is by using a tool called iDict, like iDictionary. Basically, it's a brute force login tool.

You give it what iCloud username you want to access, and it will cycle through thousands of commonly used passwords to see if any of them will get in. iCloud had a feature that if you failed to log in too many times, it would lock you out. But iDict was somehow able to bypass that lockout mechanism. Now if these hackers couldn't get into iCloud, they would try to get into the email address of the user by posing as Google or Yahoo and sending a phishing email saying their account needs attention and to log in to fix it. Except of course, the link is to the hacker server and not Google. And if all that didn't work, hackers would just try to scour a celebrity social media account looking for possible answers to the account recovery questions.

Like maybe a celebrity set the account recovery question to be, what is your first car? And maybe that celebrity posts pictures of them in their car and a hacker tries to figure out what kind of car that is. And this actually worked for a few accounts. In the spring of 2013, this hacking of celebrities was going on like crazy. There was this underground group of hackers that were hitting hundreds and hundreds of people with these phishing attacks. Many of them celebrities, almost all of them women, and they were getting access to a ton of iCloud storage accounts.

And then these hackers would trade usernames, passwords, photos, and other things amongst each other. A lot of these were A-list celebrities. And here's just a few that the hackers got into. Jennifer Lawrence's account, Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, Vanessa Hudgens, Kate Upton, her boyfriend Justin Verlander, who plays on the Houston Astros, Kirsten Dunst, Emma Watson, soccer star Hope Solo, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jill Scott, Victoria Justice, and Michaela Maroney. And some of these people were young, like 18, 19, and they probably took some of these nude photos when they were under 18. But that's just to name a few celebrities. There were so many more.

Hundreds of people were hacked by this group, all trading photos amongst each other on Anon.ib. For over a year, this goes on. Hackers were getting into one account after another, after another, after another. It was sort of for sport, sort of for adrenaline rush. And it was almost like they were doing it for like trophy collections or something. In my research for this,

I found this really weird interview when all this hacking was going on. It's with Jennifer Lawrence talking to a reporter from MTV on the red carpet. The reporter was looking something up on his iPhone and they both looked down at his iPhone. Jennifer Lawrence then says, Wait, does that say iCloud backup?

Oh, does my iCloud keep telling me to back it up? And I'm like, I don't know how to back you up. Do it yourself. phone. Jennifer Lawrence then says, oh, this is so crazy to me because she probably had her iPhone hacked like days before that interview. And you can hear her frustration with iCloud. And it wasn't with iCloud. Her frustration was with the hackers who kept telling her her iCloud needed attention. Jennifer had no idea a hacker had gained into her iCloud storage and were looking at all her photos she took with her iPhone. Now at this time, Jennifer had a boyfriend named Nick, but this was a long distance relationship. So to keep things interesting,

Jennifer would take a few nude selfies and then send them to Nick. Not just one, she did it a bunch of times. But these were meant for her and him only. But now there was a hacker in her iCloud account finding these and going bonkers about it. She had no idea these photos were being traded through an underground group of people. And she would continue to not know for another three months. At some point, someone saw AnonIB was trading celebrity nudes and bought a few. And they got the idea that if they make a collection of a bunch of these pics,

they could possibly release it and people would be so happy that they'd tip him with Bitcoin. So this collector started buying up a ton of these photos, spending hundreds of dollars in Bitcoin to create the collection, maybe even spend thousands of dollars. They spent weeks creating sets and getting certain celebrities and putting together a big collection. Some chatter started going on over at 4chan, people saying things like, some guys over on Stroll are hoarding a major win, just saying. What do you mean? I mean explicit vids and pics. See for yourself. Don't have it though, but everyone says it's legit. These were just rumors. Nobody was actually posting any of

the celeb photos on Stroll. And these Anon sites were so full of lies, jokes, and misinformation that you just really couldn't trust any of it. But then, on August 31st, 2014, everything changed. There was a massive leak of private celebrity nude pictures of stars such as Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, and Anna Kendrick posted online. It is what could be the largest breach of private, racy celebrity photos in history. Pictures of more than 100 stars, either nude or in provocative positions. They've started appearing on an image-sharing site. The collector was satisfied with what they put together and decided to post it publicly.

They went over to Bee on 4chan and posted over 100 nude or mostly nude photos of female celebrities. The collector also posted their Bitcoin address, urging people that if they like the nudes, they can tip them some coin. Almost instantly, this 4chan post blew up. People were amazed at this leak and quickly spread it wherever they could. The Kate Upton and Jennifer Lawrence subreddits had a new post with these nude photos up. And these quickly got upvoted so fast that they both hit the front page of Reddit. Before you knew it, they were spread all over Reddit, all over the internet, Facebook, Twitter, Imgur, Instagram, you name it. People started calling this massive leak of photos the fappening. And I'm not going to explain what that means. You

can guess for yourself. But that name stuck. Soon there was a subreddit called TheFappening and all the pics were posted there. And you can imagine the cacophony of people talking about this on every news outlet possible. They love talking about celebs. So nude celebrities was absolutely going to be talked about on the news. My favorite was this CNN clip. Do we even know who is this 4chan person or website? He may have been just a system administrator who knew his way around and how to hack things. The news articles were often pointing people to the fappening subreddit, as if showing people where to find these photos. The fappening subreddit became the most quickly growing subreddit in Reddit's history. 100,000 subscribers in just 24 hours.

And Reddit itself had a major spike in new visitors, like 141 million page views in just one day. The subreddit was on fire. The fappening was a crazy phenomenon, breaking Reddit at times. But news outlets thought the term the fappening was disrespectful to the victims, and they called it celebgate. Images kept spreading further all over the internet, reaching everything. More were uploaded to Imgur and Instagram and Twitter and Facebook everywhere. And Jennifer Lawrence seemed to be the poster child of this leak because there were a lot of photos of her in it, and she was an A-list celebrity, and the internet loves her. She's quirky and funny and different than a typical

Hollywood star. And Reddit the company seemed to just let the fappening subreddit happen and the photos stay up. This wasn't against their terms of service or rules, which is just really weird. So the subreddit just kept growing in popularity. A lot of people were discussing the morality of whether this is okay or not to keep up or even look at. Some of the people were realizing that some of these photos were of people under 18, which classifies it as child porn, which is illegal to post to Reddit. So the site admin started taking down those pics. And other people were questioning whether some photos were faked or not, like it might have been a lookalike model

or photoshopped to somehow look like that celebrity. And let's be clear here, Reddit at the time didn't have any way to actually host pictures. So all the pictures that were posted to Reddit were really just links to places like Imgur. But even while Reddit didn't host the pictures, people still came to Reddit to find the links to the photos. It was the go-to place to see the CelebGate photos,

all nicely organized in one spot. The media backlash against Reddit got bigger and it seemed morally wrong to keep the fappening up. Emergency meetings were being held inside Reddit to figure out what to do. While the team at Reddit did not condone or agree with this behavior, there was nothing in the law or in their rules that required them to take it down, which made the Reddit staff really do a lot of soul-searching. They really wanted their site to be an area of free speech and believed it's the users who have the responsibility to know what's right or wrong. Reddit didn't want

to come in and try to be the moral or ethics police in this situation, but they did say they'll adhere to any laws. So celebrities whose pics got posted began issuing DMCA notices to Reddit, and Reddit would acknowledge this and take down those posts. But still, the images were hosted on other image hosting sites, and it didn't take them off the internet at all. A DMCA takedown would just remove the links on Reddit. But the users weren't happy when photos got removed, so the users would just resubmit the photo to another image sharing site, and then post that link to Reddit again. Soon it became a battle, where the users were trying to post pictures to the fappening subreddit faster than what the moderators were able to remove. The mods just couldn't keep up with it all, and it kept spilling back into Reddit the company's lap.

So despite Reddit giving a clear stance on this that they aren't going to be the moral police, users on the fappening kept breaking the rules on such a massive scale that Reddit had no choice. So a week after it was created, Reddit banned the fappening. The collector person who posted all this to 4chan with their Bitcoin address? Yeah, he only got about 120 bucks in Bitcoin for all this, which is far less than he anticipated, and it frustrated him. He blames others for reposting the photo with their own Bitcoin addresses. But this didn't mark the end of Celebgate. A few weeks later, another large dump of nude celebrity photos hit 4chan. And then a week after that, another big leak. And this would be known as Celebgate 2 and 3. And I think in Celebgate 3, there were pictures

of Hulk Hogan's son. And even though Reddit had banned posting these photos, the photos still got out and they were posted all over the internet in different places. At first, nobody knew how the photos got leaked. There was speculation that there was a vulnerability in the Find My Phone app, which allowed hackers to gain access to phones. Then a lot of fingers got pointed to Apple with maybe a vulnerability in iCloud. Kirsten Dunst tweeted saying, thank you iCloud, with pizza and poop emoji after it. Some celebs denied the authenticity of the photos. Hulk Hogan's son said it wasn't him. Ariana Grande tweeted that the photos weren't real and her ass is cuter than that. And a bunch of others denied it too. Most celebs that got caught up in this remained silent to the press and didn't talk about this at all. About two months after this,

Jennifer Lawrence did talk with Vanity Fair about this. And you know what, I'll let the daytime talk show host Wendy Williams tell us what was in there. Anyway, let's talk about Jennifer Lawrence. Well, she's on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine and inside the magazine, she's breaking her silence about the nude hacking scandal. I'll read what she says and then we can talk. Okay. Just because I'm a public figure doesn't mean I asked for this. It does not mean that it comes with the territory. It's my body. It should be my choice. And the fact that it's not my choice is absolutely disgusting.

It's not your choice. It's in the cloud and I've looked several times. So I guess I'm disgusting for looking. Clap if you've looked at Jennifer Lawrence's hacking pictures. There are a lot of you who are just sitting there. You didn't react to anything, which means I'm going to assume that you want that you look, but you're scared because your boss might be watching TV and you don't want your boss to know you're a perv like me. In my opinion, if she would just stop talking about the cloud and the naked pictures, it'd go away. We'd all forget it. Like, we forget about it. Really?

Wendy went on to say that Jen should hold her head up with pride because she looks good naked, and this boosted her career. About two years later, Jennifer Lawrence appeared on the Hollywood Reporter podcast and had some more to say about this. When the hacking thing happened, it was so unbelievably violating that you can't even put into words. I think that I'm still actually processing. I don't know. I feel like, you know, I got gang banged by the fucking planet. Like everybody, there's not one person in the world that could, that is not capable of seeing these intimate, you know, photos of me.

And like, you can just be at a barbecue and somebody could just like pull up on their phone. And that was like a really impossible thing to process. Somebody said something to me about how I was a good role model for girls. And I had to go into the bathroom and sob because I felt like an imposter or I felt like I can't believe somebody still feels that way. I know that a lot of women were affected and a lot of them reached out to me about, you know, suing Apple or suing. And like, none of that was going to really bring me peace. Like none of that was going to bring my nude body back to me and Nick, the person that they were intended for. It wasn't going to bring

any of that back. So I wasn't interested in suing everybody. I was just interested in healing. The news of CelebGate was so big that I'd be shocked if anyone missed the story. And there's a lesson in this story. I think we understand technology and privacy so much better when we hear about this. Just having a nude photo of yourself on your phone that you never share is not actually that safe. It can get leaked, and it probably will get leaked. So if you do take these photos, imagine the worst case scenario happening, because it might. It's probably better to like not show your face or something. Oh, and make sure your laptop and phone cameras are covered when you're having sex, because there are a few stories

about hackers getting into cameras and recording a person unknowingly. When these hacks occurred, Apple began working with the FBI to do an investigation. And I think they only took this case because it was such a high profile story. But the FBI did create a case on this and took the evidence that Apple provided. And this led them to the hacker. The FBI found 572 unique iCloud accounts were all accessed by the same IP in the south side of Chicago. The agents worked with the ISP to determine the IP was registered to Emilio Herrera. A raid was conducted on Emilio's house, and they took all his computer equipment to investigate further.

The feds quickly determined Emilio was the hacker who broke into the celebrity counts. But this arrest also uncovered something else. The evidence they collected showed that there were a group of hackers involved, not just one. And so the FBI started making more arrests. In the next few years, they arrested five hackers total who were involved in CelebGate. They all lived in different states and only knew each other through a non-IB. Each of the suspects pled guilty to hacking an iCloud account, so there was no trial. And the investigation reports were all sealed, so I can't really see the details of what the FBI had on them. But what I did see is what I explained earlier,

which was the hacks were done by targeting individual people and then sending phishing emails to get into their iCloud logins. I think all these hackers had no prior arrest records. The first to be sentenced was Ryan. He pled guilty to hacking into 50 iCloud accounts and 72 Gmail accounts. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Then there was Edward. he said to the judge this entire process reminded me of who i really am and what i should be doing with my life and he was very cooperative with law enforcement and he had an 11 year old kid

he got put in prison for nine months and had to pay 5700 in restitution which paid for a victim's counseling bill the judge wanted to punish emilio by convicting him as a sex offender since the crime was sexual in nature. But Emilio's lawyer said that no sexual activity actually occurred in the crime and the judge agreed and took sex offender off. He was sentenced to 16 months in prison. George, another hacker, was a referee at a youth soccer club and worked as a bank teller and had a bachelor's degree.

He had something like six friends all send in letters to the judge explaining how George is such a great member of the community and he regrets what he did. And this played really well for the judge and only gave George eight months in prison. Lastly, there was Christopher. He pled guilty to sending phishing emails and hacking into 18 iCloud accounts. Christopher was a high school teacher and was also found guilty for trying to phish his underage sister-in-law, other female teachers at the school, and female students. He got the biggest punishment, which was 34 months in prison. But while these hackers pled guilty to hacking into iCloud accounts, none said they shared the photos publicly. They likely traded it privately to someone else who then posted it to 4chan. Whoever shared it publicly, we still don't know.

And I think it's still an active investigation. Maybe if they track the Bitcoin, they can find them. A lot has happened since IsAnyoneUp.com and CelebGate. First, Reddit changed their rules. Six months after closing the fappening subreddit, Reddit issued the following statement. Quote, Last year, we missed a chance to be a leader in social media when it comes to protecting your privacy, something we've cared deeply about since Reddit's inception. At our recent all-hands company meeting, this was something that we all, as a company, decided we needed to address.

So now, no matter who you are, if a photo, video, or digital image of you in a state of nudity, sexual excitement, or engaged in any sexual conduct is posted or linked to on Reddit without your permission, it is prohibited on Reddit. End quote. This is a big change in Reddit's policy. It's now strictly against the rules to post revenge porn or stolen porn on Reddit. Also, the image board AnonIB was seized by the Dutch police and it was taken offline because it kept trying to publish revenge porn, or stolen porn on Reddit. Also, the image board AnonIB was seized by the Dutch police and it was taken offline because it kept trying to publish revenge porn too. Some revenge porn victims committed suicide

after finding their classmates or friends had seen their sexual photos. This was particularly hard for like LGBT people who have not yet come out and they got their pics exposed. And once suicide started happening, legislation around revenge porn started shaping up. Many countries are now calling it a criminal offense to post sexual photos without a person's consent. And many states in the U.S. now too. It was a long, ugly road to recognize the damage revenge porn has on people. And now victims have slightly better tools to help resolve it.

And crazy exes should be aware that there's punishments for posting it. In Texas, for example, there's a statute 1135 which forbids someone from posting pictures of a person's intimate parts without their consent. If you're found guilty of this, you can get up to one year in prison and a $4,000 fine. And there are a lot of cases where people are being arrested for this. Even in Texas, a police officer got arrested for posting revenge porn last year. And I think it'll just take some time before it becomes general knowledge that it's illegal in many states to post revenge porn, and people will think twice about posting it. You've been listening to Darknet Diaries. If you or a friend has been a victim of revenge porn and need help, you can find information on what to do at badassarmy.org.

I see you sharing the show on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Reddit, and I love it. Thank you so much. It gives me goosebumps of joy every time I hear someone recommending the show. Keep it up. It's so awesome. This show is made by me, Zero Hot, Jack Recyder, and theme music is by the melodious Breakmaster Cylinder.