Victims of Hunter Moore, the owner and operator of the now-defunct revenge porn site Is Anyone Up?, have had the last laugh after he was sent to jail for 30 months for crimes committed when running the site.

The sentence was imposed by a federal judge in a Los Angeles court on Wednesday, along with a $2,000 fine on charges of hacking and aggravated identity theft; he was potentially facing up to seven years in jail and a $500,000 fine.

Moore had previously pled guilty to those charges as part of the plea agreement that saw the Department of Justice dismissing a conspiracy charge, six counts of unauthorized access to a computer and six counts of identity theft.

Upon release, Moore will be subject to three years of supervision where he must declare all email accounts, screen names, passwords and ISPs to the court.

Founded in 2010, Is Anyone Up? allowed users to anonymously submit nude photographs or streaming media of any person of a legal age limit to its database.

Although originally focused on sharing nude photos of musicians, the site quickly morphed into an infamous revenge porn site; revenge porn itself usually involves publication of sexual photographs or video of former romantic partners, often with that person’s details attached, in an act of public shaming for the purposes of revenge.

While the nature of revenge porn is dubious in itself, and in some jurisdictions is illegal, where Moore became unstuck was the fact that he was found to be paying for photos obtained from hacked email accounts.

The judge is reported to have told Moore when delivering the sentence, “Mr. Moore, you have said your victims must face the consequences of posting embarrassing photos. Now you must face the consequences of your actions.”

Moore’s accomplice in stealing the photographs, Charles Evens, was sentenced to two years and one month in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, earlier this year.

Narcissism

Clearly hacking accounts to steal photographs is illegal, but there’s illegal and then there’s stupid illegal, and Moore clearly fell into the latter category.

At the height of his infamy, Moore was dubbed the “most hated man on the Internet” by Rolling Stone, and he lapped it all up in a narcissistic orgy of attention seeking, complete with media interviews and other stunts, something only the most stupid of criminals would do.

The actions of Moore have since resulted in various jurisdictions now making the act of publishing revenge porn illegal.

Image credit: jaredeberhardt/Flickr/CC by 2.0