California man found guilty of running “revenge porn” website

[escapefromstress]

A Southern California man has been convicted of running a revenge porn website under a 2013 state law and could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison. Kevin Bollaert, of San Diego, was also found guilty on Monday of identity theft and extortion, according to the Associated Press.

His now-offline site, ugotposted.com, worked on an all-too-familiar model: readers could submit nude photos of ex-lovers (almost entirely women), and these submissions often included other personal information like links to victims' Facebook pages.

Bollaert also ran a sister website (changemyreputation.com) where he charged $350 to have this information removed. The 28-year-old reportedly made tens off thousands of dollars from this scheme.

In December, a Los Angeles man became the first to be sentenced under the new state law making revenge porn a misdemeanor. However, Bollaert was not charged under this new statute. In March 2014, Bollaert was ordered to pay $385,000 in a federal civil suit filed by an Ohio plaintiff.

“This website published intimate photos of unsuspecting victims and turned their public humiliation and betrayal into a commodity with the potential to devastate lives,” California Attorney General Kamala Harris said in a March 2013 statement following Bollaert's arrest.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/california-man-found-guilty-of-running-revenge-porn-website/

 

[LADY-VIA]

What an asshole

 

[sybian]

IMHO...The difference between running a website to sell a product, and creating a website to draw money from an individual to save their reputation, and personal info is extortion.
When he created the website in the first place ,he showed criminal intent, and low moral standards on more than one level....
The second he took that first $350 from someone, he became a maggot feeding from a carcass.

 

[EuroSZabina]

Believe in Karma, they all get what they deserve in one way or other.

 

[westcoast555]

A Southern California man has been convicted of running a revenge porn website under a 2013 state law and could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison. Kevin Bollaert, of San Diego, was also found guilty on Monday of identity theft and extortion, according to the Associated Press.

His now-offline site, ugotposted.com, worked on an all-too-familiar model: readers could submit nude photos of ex-lovers (almost entirely women), and these submissions often included other personal information like links to victims' Facebook pages.

Bollaert also ran a sister website (changemyreputation.com) where he charged $350 to have this information removed. The 28-year-old reportedly made tens off thousands of dollars from this scheme.

In December, a Los Angeles man became the first to be sentenced under the new state law making revenge porn a misdemeanor. However, Bollaert was not charged under this new statute. In March 2014, Bollaert was ordered to pay $385,000 in a federal civil suit filed by an Ohio plaintiff.

“This website published intimate photos of unsuspecting victims and turned their public humiliation and betrayal into a commodity with the potential to devastate lives,” California Attorney General Kamala Harris said in a March 2013 statement following Bollaert's arrest.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/california-man-found-guilty-of-running-revenge-porn-website/

These assholes are one notch above child molesters. They need to be shut down, nothing to do with free expression, business etc. It's pure defamation, extortion, slander, and character assassination and it's unacceptable.

 

[escapefromstress]

Revenge porn site owner sentenced to 18 years in prison

A website owner who encouraged users to post sexually explicit images of other people without their permission has been sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Kevin Bollaert, 28, allowed 10,170 photos (mostly of women) to be posted to his now-defunct revenge porn website, UGotPosted.com. He had users include identifying information with the photos, such as names, addresses and links to Facebook profiles. He then emailed the victims, telling them their photos could be removed for up to $350 through his second site, ChangeMyReputation.com. At his trial in February in California Superior Court in San Diego, 21 victims testified to the damage Bollaert’s site had caused. He was then charged with 21 counts of identity theft and six counts of extortion.

... On the federal level, the battle against revenge porn has found a place in the world of copyright and business practices. First, if the explicit photo was taken by its subject — a “selfie” — the photographer owns the rights to that photo, and its existence on the Internet without permission is a violation of copyright.

... Revenge porn websites are technically businesses, which means they fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC can then punish them for “unfair business practices.”

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-news/20150405-revenge-porn-site-owner-sentenced-to-18-years-in-prison.ece

 

[westwoody]

The scumbag had hundreds of victims and knew exactly what he was doing: extortion, blackmail, ruining people's lives. Hope he has fun in the slammer. Total asshole and if you watch his sentencing he feels sorry for himself and does not feel anything for the people he hurt.

Interested to see if the dirty dot com goes the same way, very similar business model.

 

[ElAngelo]

This POS does deserve his ass in prison, but a sentence of 18 years??? That's BS, if you compare that to violent crimes. (ok, most likely, he'll only do a part of that sentence with good behavious). Murderers and rapists are back in society, before he is. A sentence of 8 years at most would have been justice.

The extortion of these victims probably made the sentence so ginormous and the gov prolly made him an example, so other copycats like myex, theporndude,... shut down their site most. Kevin was addicted to the easy money. He was earning ($30.000+) for basically doing 0 + thought that he was safe behind his pc screen.

Even with a nationwide revenge porn law, I don't see it do a lot, since guys share their ex-girlfriend's video or pics in a state of 'rage', but at least something is changing now. The damage has been done though and once your private vid/pic is put online, it's impossible to get it all down.

In my opinion, the government should do more effort on prevention in high schools. Maybe inform teens about the risks/consequences of 'revenge porn' in sex education class?

 

[escapefromstress]

Victoria sexting teen given conditional discharge
Teenager was found guilty of possessing and distributing child pornography

A B.C. teenager who was found guilty on child pornography charges after "sexting" naked images of her boyfriend's former girlfriend has been handed a six-month conditional discharge.

The 18-year-old — who cannot be named as all those involved were 16 at the time of the offence — must send a letter of apology to the the victim. If she does that, she will have no criminal record and will not face prison.

The teen was convicted in January 2014 of possessing and distributing child pornography and uttering threats.

"I'm sorry for my part in this," the girl said in court Monday. "If I could take it back, I would. "This is not who I am."

The court found that she had texted nude pictures of her boyfriend's ex-girlfriend to a friend and posted one to the victim's Facebook page in an attempt to humiliate the girl.

In an emotional interview with CBC's The Current in February of this year, the convicted girl described how her life had been affected since the charges, with her grades dropping dramatically and having to change schools because of bullying.

Asked if she thought what she had done was cyberbullying, she said it was, and that she understood it should be taken seriously, but that she didn't think the court understood how central technology is to teens' lives. "I was just angry," she said. "And I didn't know it was illegal. Obviously, I knew it wasn't right."

In the same interview, Christopher Mackie, the girl's lawyer, said that his client had suffered enough over the past two years and that he would be asking for no further penalties.

On the day of the incident, his client had been with her then boyfriend, Mackie said, when he discovered his former girlfriend had been sharing naked pictures of him. When Mackie's client found out that her boyfriend still had naked images of his ex, she sent one to the ex via a private message on Facebook. He said his client also texted some images to her own best friend.

Though his client's actions "fit the factual definition" of the child pornography charges, Mackie said that they were not meant to apply to youth, but to protect young people from pedophiles.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/victoria-sexting-teen-given-conditional-discharge-1.3050679

 

[escapefromstress]

Google will honour requests to remove revenge porn

SAN FRANCISCO – Google plans to censor unauthorized nude photos from its influential Internet search engine in a policy change aimed at cracking down on a malicious practice known as “revenge porn.”

The new rules announced Friday will allow people whose naked pictures have been posted on a website without their permission to ask Google to prevent links to the image from appearing in its search results. A form for submitting the censorship requests to Google should be available within the next few weeks, according to the Mountain View, California, company.

Google traditionally has resisted efforts to erase online content from its Internet search engine, maintaining that its judgments about information and images should be limited to how relevant the material is to each person’s query. That libertarian approach helped establish Google as the world’s most dominant search engine, processing roughly two-thirds of all online requests for information.

The company decided to make an exception with the unauthorized sharing of nude photos because those images are often posted by ex-spouses and jilted romantic partners or extortionists demanding ransoms to take down the pictures.

“Revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims – predominantly women,” Amit Singhal, Google’s senior vice-president of search, wrote in a Friday blog post.

Google’s stand against revenge porn won’t necessarily purge it from the Internet because it has no authority to order other sites to remove offensive or even illegal content. But Google is hoping revenge porn will prove less mortifying to its intended victims by making it more difficult to find.

Other heavily trafficked sites, including the social forum Reddit, have embraced policies banning nude photos from being posted without the subject’s permission. Earlier this year, Google tried to prohibit sexually explicit material from the publicly accessible sites in its Blogger service only to reverse itself within a few days amid cries of unwarranted censorship among Blogger’s users.

This isn’t the first time Google has excised sensitive content from its search index. In most instances, the company has been forced to do so under laws imposed in various countries where it operates. While its search engine operated in mainland China from 2006 through 2010, Google blocked information that the country’s Communist government deemed to be inappropriate and the company has been scrubbing humiliating information from people’s pasts in Europe for the past year.

© The Canadian Press, 2015

http://globalnews.ca/news/2067630/google-will-honour-requests-to-remove-revenge-porn/?hootPostID=0a59feb3fb4e2f75c640e60688ef48bf

Twitter updates privacy policy to ban revenge porn

TORONTO – Twitter has updated its privacy policy with new language that forbids users from posting so-called revenge porn. The new rules read, “You may not post intimate photos or videos that were taken or distributed without the subject’s consent.”

Previously, Twitter’s rules only prohibited users from publishing people’s private and confidential information, such as credit card numbers, addresses or social security numbers.

From now on, any user who violates the rule will have their account suspended.

The changes come as Twitter and other social networks try to crack down on the amount of harassment happening on social networks. Twitter has been struggling with containing harassment on its platform for years.

http://globalnews.ca/news/1878683/twitter-updates-privacy-policy-to-ban-revenge-porn/