Hunter Moore: The Undoing of the Internet's Most Hated Man

A notorious internet troll builds a revenge-porn empire that terrorizes thousands—until a determined mother launches a relentless campaign to bring him down and dismantle the most toxic community on the web. Sources for this episode include:The Netflix docuseries The Most Hated Man on the Internet“Hunter Moore: The Most Hated Man on the Internet” (Rolling Stone) Keep up with Killer Stories! Instagram: @killerstoriespodTikTok: @killerstoriespodX: @killerstorieshq Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Harvey Guillén?

  You know the story of Pandora's Box? Zeus gives her a jar and tells her never to open it. She opens it anyway, because that's what happens in these stories. And out comes everything terrible: sickness, sorrow, cruelty. But after all the horrors escape, one thing stayed behind: hope. The Greeks argued for centuries about what that meant. Was hope the antidote to suffering? Or was it trapped too, unable to reach us? The internet opened a box we didn't know existed. It let out cruelties we didn't have names for yet.

• 0:50Harvey Guillén?

  And for a while, it seemed like nothing could be put back. But then, something happened. People started fighting. They looked at the open box and said, "Maybe we can't close it, but we can make new rules for a world where it's open." I'm Harvey Guillén, and this is Killer Story.

• 1:35Harvey Guillén?

  Let's go back to 2010. If you weren't online back then, it's hard to explain what the internet felt like. It was younger, wild, the rules hadn't been written yet. Or rather, nobody had figured out they needed rules. This was the era of the iPhone 4, of Facebook hitting 500 million users and Mark Zuckerberg being named Time's Person of the Year. The message was clear: the future belonged to people who shared, who connected, who put themselves out there. Everyone was oversharing, posting everything, believing that if you had nothing to hide, you had nothing to fear.

• 2:18Harvey Guillén?

  Which, looking back, was a really naive thing to believe. Because here's what we didn't understand yet: the internet isn't a town square. It's not a place where everyone plays by the same rules. And the worst that could happen is someone shouts something rude. The internet is more like a city that never sleeps, where everything you do is recorded forever. And in 2010, we were all walking around that city with our doors unlocked. In the middle of it all sits Sacramento, California, and a man named Hunter Moore.

• 3:02Harvey Guillén?

  By most measures, Hunter is not a success story. He's not rich, he's not famous, he's not building anything. But Hunter has something else: he's magnetic. People who need him describe him as funny, charming even, the kind of guy who can talk his way into or out of almost anything. One former girlfriend would later describe their time together as "pretty normal." He was sweet, he made her laugh. Which makes what comes next so shocking. In late 2010, Hunter launches a website, isanyoneup.com.

• 3:44Harvey Guillén?

  Originally, it's just a nightlife blog, but then Hunter makes a discovery. He posts a nude photo of a girl he knows, someone he says broke his heart. He shows his friends, and then they start adding photos. Just one week later, the site has racked up 14,000 visits. Now, let's be clear here: the women in the photos have no idea that thousands of people are seeing their nude pictures. They haven't consented. Isanyoneup.com has just become the first dedicated portal for revenge porn. The term refers to someone who takes intimate photos

• 4:26Harvey Guillén?

  that were meant to be private and puts them on display without consent, usually out of spite, or jealousy, or just because they can. It's not about sex, it's about humiliation, it's about control. And it turns something personal into a public spectacle, whether the person in the photo ever agreed to that or not. Hunter doesn't just build a website, he invents a new genre of human cruelty. To throw another internet term into the mix, Hunter doxes the people posted on the site. He requires every submission to include the victim's full name,

• 5:11Harvey Guillén?

  their profession, their city and state. Most crucially, he requires links to their social media profiles: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. This was to make sure the pictures would show up on Google. Utter humiliation. But Hunter isn't satisfied with just being a webmaster. No, he wants to be a messiah. He builds a following he calls "the family." Usually, when you say "the family," you're either talking about the Corleones or a Thanksgiving dinner.

• 5:53Harvey Guillén?

  Hunter's family is mostly just a collection of angry guys in cargo shorts who feel rejected by women. Still, the family aren't just fans, they're disciples. They call Hunter "Father." They'll do anything to get his attention. If he says "jump," they ask "how high?" One guy posted a video of himself punching himself in the face just because Hunter asked him to. The family will also treat the victims on Is Anyone Up the way Hunter wants them to be treated. He would tweet out a girl's profile and say, "Ruin her." And the family would swarm.

• 6:34Harvey Guillén?

  They would flood her inbox with death threats, they would call her workplace. Hunter feeds off this energy. He starts hosting parties, Is Anyone Up Live, where fans pay to come and worship him. He stands on stage, high on cocaine and vodka, screaming into a microphone while the crowd chants his name.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Leave us outside! Don't leave [BLEEP] leave us outside, we're gonna after-party. Dude, you know who the [BLEEP] I am? I got [BLEEP] felonies in my pocket right now, so [BLEEP] get me outside.

• 7:09Harvey Guillén?

  He operates as if the rules of the physical world didn't apply to the digital one. He says in interviews, "Privacy is dead, get over it." He said, "I'm doing God's work." Hunter goes on national television to talk about his website. When Anderson Cooper asks if he ever feels sorry for the people on his website, Hunter victim blames them. He says they shouldn't have taken the pictures if they didn't want them on his site. And to make it worse, two of his victims are sitting right next to him.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  But they're sitting right here, I mean, you don't feel any...

• 7:47Speaker 03

  No, I mean, no one put a gun to your head and made you take these pictures. It's 2011.

• 7:53Harvey Guillén?

  Class act. Hunter monetizes the cruelty. The site is getting 30 million page views a month, which, let's be clear, that's his claim. We can't be sure if that's true or if he's just beefing up his numbers to look cool. He's making thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue, mainly from other pornography sites. He buys a luxury car, he undesigns your clothes, he parties a lot. Hunter thinks he's untouchable. He spends his days citing the First Amendment, claiming free speech protects him. Now, here's where you're probably asking, "Wait, how is any of this legal?" Great question. The answer is Section 230.

• 8:38Harvey Guillén?

  Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is one of the most important and most controversial laws of the internet age. The short version is this: if you run a website, you're not responsible for what your users post. It's the reason Facebook doesn't get sued every time someone writes something defamatory. It's the reason Twitter, or whatever it's called now, can exist at all. Hunter understands Section 230 well. He claims IsAnyoneUp.com is just a platform. He didn't take the photos, he didn't write the captions. His users did. He was just the guy who built the bathroom wall. He couldn't be blamed for the graffiti. And for a while, he's right.

• 9:23Harvey Guillén?

  The law is on his side, the victims have nowhere to turn. But, the thing about hiding behind a legal shield is that it only works if you stay behind it. Hunter is about to step out.

• 10:12Speaker 04

  Observe: the North American dad. 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles, and says, "Dang, that's a good offer." The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle, no one called him "boss." He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on Carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.

• 10:43Speaker 05

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• 11:15Harvey Guillén?

  By late 2010, isanyoneup.com is reaching 350,000 views per day. But soon, Hunter realizes he has a supply problem. User submissions were great, but they were inconsistent. Some weeks, the site was flooded with content. Other weeks, things were slow. And Hunter Moore wanted more. He wanted the photos people didn't even know existed. The ones saved on hard drives, the ones never meant for anyone else to see. So he makes a decision that will change everything. He stops waiting for people to submit photos and starts stealing them.

• 11:59Harvey Guillén?

  Enter Charles Evans. If Hunter is the face of the operation, loud and desperate for attention, Charles is the opposite. He's quiet, he keeps to himself, and he lives alone in Studio City in California. When Hunter reaches out to him, Charles is in a dark place. He was fired from his job for drinking and recently got out of rehab. He's looking for anything to give him purpose and a little bit of cash. Charles is a hacker, not the kind you see in the movies typing furiously while green code scrolls down the screen. He's a Ratter. RAT stands for Remote Access Trojan.

• 12:42Harvey Guillén?

  It's a type of malware that gives you complete control over someone else's computer. You can see their screen, you can read their files, you can turn on their webcam and watch them without their knowledge. It's a power trip disguised as hacking. You're not just stealing data, you're owning someone. You're sitting in your chair, drinking a soda, watching a stranger go about their day, and they have no idea you're there. In 2011, Hunter begins paying Charles up to 900 a week to hack into the private email accounts of specific victims. It works like this.

• 13:24Harvey Guillén?

  Charles sends a phishing email to a victim, maybe disguised as a song file or a cute picture. The victim clicks it, and the RAT works silently in the background. It installs itself into the system registry. Suddenly, Charles owns the machine. He can sit in his chair in Studio City and watch a girl in Ohio typing her homework. He can get into her email. It's the ultimate power trip. But it gets even more nefarious than that. Hunter sends Charles a wish list. Maybe it's a woman who rejected him, maybe it's someone who insulted him on Twitter.

• 14:09Harvey Guillén?

  Charles hacks into the target's computer using RAT. He looks for the intimate, private moments that people save for themselves. The photos taken in mirrors, the photos taken for doctors, the photos that were never meant to leave the hard drive. Charles downloads them, then he emails them to Hunter. The next morning, the victim wakes up. Their phone is blowing up. "Strangers are commenting on my Facebook. My boss is calling me. My dad is calling me." They type their name into Google, and there it is. IsAnyoneUp.com.

• 14:51Harvey Guillén?

  Their naked body, their full name, a link to their Facebook account. Imagine the vertigo, imagine the panic. You didn't send that photo to an ex, you didn't send it to anyone, it was on your computer. It feels like black magic. And when the victim's email Hunter, begging him to take it down, Hunter doesn't apologize. He replies with three letters: L-O-L. He thinks the internet is a shield that can never be pierced. But he didn't count on a girl named Kayla Laws.

• 15:35Harvey Guillén?

  And more importantly, he didn't count on her mother. Charlotte Laws is not your typical vigilante. She lives in Los Angeles, she's an author, a former politician, and an animal rights activist. But Hunter will soon find out Charlotte is the final girl in a horror movie he didn't realize he was starring in. And spoiler alert, the final girl always wins. In late 2011, Charlotte's daughter Kayla, a 24-year-old aspiring actress, took some photos of herself, not for anyone else, just for herself. You know, playful shots in front of a mirror. She emailed them to her own account to free up space on her phone.

• 16:20Harvey Guillén?

  This is something millions of people do. It's not reckless, it's not asking for it, it's just existing in a world with smartphones. A few months later, in early January 2012, Kayla gets locked out of her email account. Hmm. She has to reset her password to get back in. Strange, but not alarming, these things happen. Nine days after that, one of those photos appeared on isanyoneup.com. Kayla finds out at work. She's waitressing, trying to make ends meet while she pursues an acting career. A coworker pulls her aside. There's something she needs to see.

• 17:02Harvey Guillén?

  When Kayla sees the photos, she calls her mother, Charlotte, in tears. The photos had been posted alongside links to her acting profile and social media. Her dream career is now in danger. The comment section is vile. Strangers saying things I won't even repeat. Men sending her threats. Her inbox is overflowing with filth from people she's never met. Kayla can't leave the house. Every person holding a phone might have seen her. Every stranger who looks at her twice might know. She stops eating. She stops going out.

• 17:47Harvey Guillén?

  Charlotte watches her daughter disappear into herself. So she decides to take action. Charlotte goes to the Los Angeles Police Department, and the detective looks at the photos and basically just shrugs. And he implies that, well, maybe she shouldn't have taken them. I wish that were a lie, but it's true. Now, if Charlotte wasn't a Karen before, I wouldn't blame her for going ballistic now. The cops see a girl who just made a mistake, but Charlotte sees a crime scene. But she's fighting a ghost. In 2012, revenge porn isn't a crime yet. There's no law against being a digital jerk on a massive scale.

• 18:32Harvey Guillén?

  If someone steals your car, the police know what to do. If someone steals your dignity and puts it on a website, they tell you to log off. Charlotte walks out of the police station, she gets in her car, and she decides, if the system isn't going to help her, she'll do it herself.

• 18:55Speaker 06

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• 19:25Speaker 05

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• 19:55Speaker 07

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• 20:05Speaker 05

  Or with cinnamon and sugar for my book club gals. We enjoy Stonefire Non. Before the ritual summoning of the Nameless Ones.

• 20:12Speaker 04

  We invoke the Nameless Ones, they shall not be named. And we do Stonefire pizza parties for the kids.

• 20:19Speaker 07

  I'm really scared right now. Stonefire, from our tradition to yours. Together, we on.

• 20:28Harvey Guillén?

  If you were to walk into Charlotte Laws dining room in the spring of 2012, it would look less like a home and more like a detective's office. She's managed to get Kayla's photos off Is Anyone Up? But now she can't stop because she knows Kayla isn't the only victim. And if she walks away now, Hunter will keep doing this to other people's daughters. Charlotte starts reaching out to women whose photos have been posted around the same time as Kayla's. She tells her story and listens to theirs. There's a teacher in Kansas whose photos end up on Is Anyone Up? The family goes after her.

• 21:09Harvey Guillén?

  They call her principal and the school board call her horrific names. She gets fired. Or the woman who fears losing custody of her children if her ex-husband finds the photos. She gets so paranoid, she changes her name and her phone number and moves to a new town. Charlotte documents over 40 victims. She interviews them like a homicide detective. When did you first notice your email was compromised? Did you receive any suspicious messages before that? Do you remember her name? It works. She finds the pattern. The victims weren't random.

• 21:50Harvey Guillén?

  They all had received phishing emails from the same alias, Gary Jones. Charlotte traces the alias through digital breadcrumbs, domain registrations, email headers, the kind of technical details that most people would never think to look for. She links Gary Jones to Charles Evans and his Studio City apartment. And then she finds PayPal records showing payments from Hunter Moore to Charles Evans. She has the money trail, proof that Hunter isn't just passively running this platform, he's actively paying someone to commit crimes on his behalf.

• 22:31Harvey Guillén?

  The moment he starts ordering photos like he's ordering a pizza, his entire legal defense collapses. You can't claim you're just hosting content when you're literally commissioning the theft. Charlotte doesn't just stop at research. She goes undercover. She creates fake social media accounts and infiltrates the family. She engages with Hunter's fans and lets them attack her. And attack, they do. They post her home address. They send death threats. They describe in graphic detail what they want to do to her daughter. Hunter himself tweets about her. He mocks her. He calls her crazy.

• 23:15Harvey Guillén?

  He thinks he's trolling some suburban mom who will eventually go away. He doesn't realize that every threat, every tweet, every attack was being printed, cataloged, and added to a binder that was getting thicker by the day. Charlotte takes that binder to the FBI in mid-2012. And this time, they take her seriously. Meanwhile, Hunter has made a classic villain mistake. He thought he was the king of the internet. He forgot about Anonymous. Anonymous is hard to explain if you weren't paying attention to the internet in 2012. They're not an organization, exactly.

• 23:58Harvey Guillén?

  There's no headquarters, no membership card, no leader giving orders. They're more like a hive mind. Thousands of hackers and activists who coordinate through message boards to target people or institutions they find morally offensive. By 2012, they'd already gone after the Church of Scientology. They'd taken down government websites. They'd become a force that even major corporations feared. When they turned their attention to Hunter, they launched what they called Operation Hunt Hunter. And they aren't looking for justice. They were looking to dismantle him using his own tools.

• 24:42Harvey Guillén?

  They crashed his servers with DDoS attacks, flooding the site with so much traffic that it collapses. They published his social security number. They posted his parents' address. They doxed him the same way he doxed hundreds of women. Hunter, the man who laughed at victims for crying, suddenly knew what it felt like to be hunted. He becomes paranoid. He starts carrying a gun. He tells friends he saw people watching his house. He can't sleep without pills. The pressure is coming from everywhere now. Anonymous on one side and the FBI investigation on the other.

• 25:24Harvey Guillén?

  Lawsuits piling up, death threats in his inbox. And then he sells the website. In April 2012, the users of Is Anyone Up type in the URL expecting revenge porn, but the site doesn't load. Instead, they're redirected to bullyville.com. James McGibney runs an anti-bullying organization called Bullyville. He convinced Hunter to sell him the domain for $12,000. The moment the sale goes through, James deletes everything. The photos vanished. The comments vanished. Years of cruelty wiped from the servers.

• 26:09Harvey Guillén?

  Hunter tries to spin it. He claims he's retiring. He claims he's made millions. He even announces plans to start a new site, one that would include victims' home addresses. Anonymous responds by intensifying their attacks. Hunter eventually walks back the announcement. He says he'd been drunk and coked out when he made it. But the FBI doesn't close a case just because a website shuts down. They're still coming. The hammer drops on January 23, 2014. It's early morning in Woodland, California. The mist is still on the ground. Hunter is asleep in his house.

• 26:53Harvey Guillén?

  He doesn't hear a knock. He hears the sound of a battering ram splintering his front door. The tactical team swarms the house. They move through the living room with assault rifles raised. They find the king of the internet in his boxers, disoriented, blinking in the flashing beams. It's hard to look like a digital god when you're standing in your kitchen in your chonies, while the FBI suggests you put your hands up. At the exact same moment, in Studio City, agents kick down the door of Charles Evans. Hunter and Charles are both charged with conspiracy to access a protected computer

• 27:34Harvey Guillén?

  without authorization, an aggravated identity theft. The evidence Charlotte Laws had gathered and the FBI had verified is overwhelming. They have the PayPal records. They have email exchanges. They have Charles, who is now cooperating with investigators. Hunter Moore, the man who has spent years bragging that he was untouchable, realizes he's trapped in a cage he can't troll his way out of. In February 2015, he pleads guilty. At the sentencing hearing, the judge reads letters from the victims, including from

• 28:17Harvey Guillén?

  Kayla Laws, who tells the court that Hunter had called himself a professional life ruiner, and that's exactly what he'd done to her. The judge sentenced Hunter to two years and six months in federal prison. Charles gets two years and one month. He serves his time. He pays a $2,000 fine. And when he gets out in May 2017, he's placed under supervision with strict conditions. He's banned from major social media platforms. And for the duration of his release, he's legally barred from running any site that traffics in sexually explicit material. By all accounts, he lives a quiet life now.

• 29:02Harvey Guillén?

  He wrote a memoir. He occasionally pops up on podcasts, still insisting he doesn't regret what he did. The king of the internet is gone. But whether he's actually changed? That's harder to say. What did change, thankfully, is the law. When Hunter was running Is Anyone Up, what he was doing wasn't technically a crime. Victims went to police and were told there was nothing anyone could do. The system hadn't caught up to the cruelty the internet made possible. That's not true anymore. Charlotte Laws testified before the California State Senate in 2013.

• 29:44Harvey Guillén?

  She helped pass Senate Bill 255, making California a second state to criminalize revenge porn. Today, revenge porn is a crime in all 50 states, every single one. In 2022, Congress passed federal protections allowing victims to sue for damages. In 2025, the Take It Down Act was signed into law, requiring websites to remove non-consensual images within 48 hours. If Hunter Moore tried to launch Is Anyone Up today, he wouldn't just face civil suits. He'd face criminal charges in any state in the country.

• 30:28Harvey Guillén?

  The legal vacuum that let him operate with impunity, it's gone. That doesn't undo what happened. The victims still carry what was done to them. Some of those photos are still out there, buried in servers and archives. You can legislate away trauma. But the world changed. Charlotte and Kayla proved something important, that when enough people decide a cruelty is unacceptable, the rules can shift. Because nobody can close Pandora's box. But there's hope and what can change after it opens. Thanks for tuning into Killer Stories, a Spotify podcast.

• 31:13Harvey Guillén?

  New episodes release on Mondays. If you liked today's story and want to learn more, we drop some of our favorite sources in the episode description. Until next time, I'm Harvey Guillén. Stay safe out there.

• 31:32Speaker 05

  When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's fall drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy-to-layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on lululemon.com now.

• 32:02Speaker 05

  Does checking your bank statements feel like digging through a dusty attic full of forgotten subscriptions and old free trials? Experian can help take the pain out of canceling by handling it for you. Think of it as Operation Get Your Sanity Back. Over 200 subscriptions are cancelable. So get started in the Experian app and see how much you could save. Results will vary. Not all subscriptions eligible. Savings not guaranteed. Paid membership with connected payment account required. See experian.com for details.

• 32:29Speaker 07

  Experian. Stonefire Non is inspired by ancient traditions, baked on stone at blazing high heat, but it's perfect for your new traditions, too. I love putting out Stonefire Non with dips for board game night.

• 32:41Speaker 05

  Or with cinnamon and sugar for my book club gals. We enjoy Stonefire Non.

• 32:46Speaker 04

  Before the ritual summoning of the Nameless One. We invoke the Nameless One. They shall not be named. And we do Stonefire pizza parties for the kids.

• 32:56Speaker 07

  I'm really scared right now. Stonefire, from our tradition to yours. Together, we on.