[MeMyselfAndI]

A Victim Named Jill

Jill was a kindergarten teacher in Kansas. I knew she was going to be posted. Moore had mentioned it on his Twitter feed — which I had been monitoring — and he asked his followers if they thought she'd get fired. They had responded with the typical landslide of loutish and smutty comments.

An hour later, her photos were visible to the world along with identifying information, including the name of the school where she taught. This was the cue for followers of Is Anyone Up? to bombard the principal and school board with Jill's naked shots and crude remarks, such as "Fire that slut" and "You have a ***** teaching your children."

"Is Jill there?" I said to the school receptionist. "She's in class right now."

"I'd like to leave a message. This is urgent. Please tell her to call me when she gets time."

While I was leaving my message, the principal had marched into Jill's classroom and interrupted her lesson.

"Please gather your things and go home," he said while five-year-old students watched in wonder.

Bewildered, Jill accumulated her belongings, and as she was leaving the building, the receptionist handed her my message. She called me from the parking lot; and that is when I revealed the agonizing news.

Jill became hysterical, repeating, "Oh, my God. No. Oh, my God. No."

I was teary-eyed myself. I could feel each victim's pain, and I could imagine being in their situation. Anyone could be in their situation. It was not their fault. Making calls was depressing, and I felt like a suicide hotline. Yet, in a weird sense, it was satisfying in that I felt I was helping others. Plus, I had experience with the issue, and I could offer advice.

I gave Jill instructions on how to send take-down notices to Google and other search engines in order to de-index her name from the pictures. I told her to beef up her online presence, joining respectable websites so the disturbing pictures wouldn't appear on the first page. I told her to register the photos with the copyright office, and I told her about the FBI investigation.

"Plus, if I get my daughter's picture off the Internet, I will tell you what I did."


A Victim Named Tory

Tory lived in Atlanta, and her computer had been compromised by "Gary Jones." A medical image of her bloody and bandaged breasts appeared on Is Anyone Up? next to her name, workplace and a link to her Facebook page. Her nipples were fully visible.

"The photo is from my doctor's office," Tory weeped into the phone. "I'd just had surgery. How could someone do this to me?"


A Victim Named Tina

Tina from northern California was also a victim. She and a female friend had been documenting weight loss through photos. Some of the shots were topless. "Gary Jones" had gotten into Tina's email, nabbed the sexiest pictures, and sent them to Moore, who posted them.

"I was horrified," she told me on the phone. "I was at the drugstore and a total stranger came up to me and said 'I've seen you naked.'"

Tina had been stalked online, and she was seeing a psychologist because she no longer felt safe in the world.

A Victim Named Cathy

Forty-year-old Cathy was divorced, and she feared losing custody of her two children. She had taken extreme measures to dodge the graphic photos depicted beside her name, city and social media links. Cathy had quit her job, changed her phone number, moved to a new town and gone back to using her maiden name. She was freaked out when I located her because she thought she'd erased all traces of her existence.

"I don't understand how you found me," she bawled into the phone. "If my ex-husband sees the photos, he will petition to take my kids away. I'm gonna lose my kids. What am I going to do? I can't lose my children."

Cathy had not been hacked; her photos had been morphed. In other words, she had never taken a nude shot. Someone had photoshopped her head with an unknown nude body in highly acrobatic and embarrassing poses. It made Cathy look like a veteran porn star.

"I've emailed Hunter Moore 20 times. He knows it isn't me, but he won't take the pictures down," she wailed. "Please help me."


The Results of My Informal Survey

Within a week, I had spoken with dozens of victims from around the country, and my findings were astonishing. A full 40 percent had been hacked only days before their photos were loaded onto Is Anyone Up? In most cases, the scam began through Facebook and ended when "Gary Jones" gained access to the victim's email account. Another 12 percent of my sample group claimed their names and faces were morphed or posted next to nude bodies that were not theirs; and 36 percent believed they were revenge porn victims in the traditional "angry ex-boyfriend sense" (although some of these folks were on good terms with their exes and thought the exes might have been hacked). Lastly, 12 percent of my sample group were "self-submits." The "self-submits," of course, are not victims at all; they are individuals who willingly sent their images to Moore. In the end, it was disturbing to realize that over half of the folks from my informal study were either criminally hacked or posted next to body parts that were not theirs.

A Victim Named Mandy

Mandy was a special victim. If I was Sherlock Holmes, she was my Watson. She originated from Iran, had been hacked by "Gary Jones" and was as feisty as a tornado. Under her topless photo, there were posts, such as "I hope she gets stoned to death." Although Mandy was Catholic, rather than Muslim, she had highly religious relatives, who would ostracize her permanently for this sort of transgression.

At one point, while I was on the phone with Mandy, Charles decided to help us, saying, "Hunter Moore will regret the day he messed with Kayla Laws."


Mandy had never been a private eye, but she knew how to finagle information, find clues, look outside of the box and compile information for "Operation No Moore." Although she was afraid of "the most hated man on the Internet," a name the media had bestowed upon Moore, she worked tirelessly behind the scenes, helping me compile evidence for the FBI.

An Alliance with Facebook

"He's back on Facebook," Mandy revealed. "We need to wait until he gets a few thousand friends, then pow. Kick him off."

I was in daily contact with a number of victims from Is Anyone Up? Although they felt helpless, frightened and exploited, they shared a minor joy, a feeling of power that could be exerted at will. We could kick Hunter Moore off Facebook anytime, any moment, regardless of how much effort he expended to compile "friends." This is because I had created an alliance with the executives at the popular social networking service, something that seemed quite remarkable in itself.

I had initially contacted Facebook to request that they fund a civil suit on behalf of victims. They had banned Moore from their site and sent him a legal letter because he had violated their terms of service by linking victims' photos with Facebook pages. Moore responded to their letter with a copy of his penis. He had also put a bounty on their lead attorney; in other words, he wanted nude photos of this man. Facebook executives mulled over my "civil lawsuit idea," but ultimately decided against it, thinking it would lead to a slippery slope in which everyone would ask them to finance lawsuits.

The victims and I repeatedly kicked Moore off of Facebook. He would sneak on, create a new page and tirelessly build a huge network of friends and followers. We would wait patiently. Then, I would make the all-important phone call and ****, his page would disappear. The victims would phone me, elated. Also, one person from our group knew the CEO of PayPal and got Moore banned from the e-commerce site, hindering his ability to collect donations.