(Screencap: Indiegogo)

Back in April, Colorado-based revenge porn proprietor Craig Brittain promised that he would shutter his online nudes hub Is Anybody Down, feigning remorse about posting naked photos without women's consent and even changing his Twitter bio to something so emo it'd make Taking Back Sunday proud. But shortly after declaring his intent to shut down the site, Mr. Brittain registered obamanudes.com and transferred all of Is Anybody Down's archives there. When visitors go to isanybodydown.com, they're greeted with a message: "Is Anybody Down is OVER! Obama Nudes has begun. http://obamanudes.com/"

Now, Mr. Brittain has devised a new scheme to flout the desires of victims who want him to take down their intimate photos. He and Is Anybody Down co-owner Chance Trahan have launched an Indiegogo campaign with a goal of $200,000, claiming that if they hit their goal they will officially shut down both sites. And they've named their campaign after revenge porn victim Holly Jacobs' victim resource hub, End Revenge Porn.

In the campaign description, Mr. Brittain explains that a series of mistakes he made in his youth led him to have an arrest record, and that coupled with his depression have kept him from holding a legitimate job. Because of this, he has been forced to host your naked photos without your consent in order to make money to pay for food and rent.

According to the campaign:

We don't really want to keep these pictures or profiles up. We have no real interest in them. We had hoped that by this point in time, we would've made enough money to purchase a real business and cover our bills, but we haven't been able to do so. We thought that our plan would work, that we'd make money and sell off the website and by now we would have houses and decent lives, even if only for a short time...

But, you can help those people. If we are able to raise $200,000, we will shut down all of our websites and auction off the domain names. We will never run any other websites like obamanudes.com.

Mr. Brittain's Is Anybody Down has been the subject of local news team investigations, which revealed that he may have posed as women on Craigslist to obtain nude photos. He also claims to have a partnership with an independent organization called Takedown Hammer, run by New York attorney David Blade III. For $250, revenge porn victims can pay "David Blade" to have their photos removed from Is Anybody Down. However, no such attorney exists in the New York State Unified Court System’s attorney database, and emails sent from Mr. Brittain appear to have come from the same I.P. as those sent by the Takedown Hammer. This has caused some, like attorney Marc Randazza, to label Mr. Brittain's operation as scam.

The Indiegogo campaign takes this notion a bit further: instead of asking victims for money to rid the web of their pictures, Misters Brittain and Trahan are instead asking the entire Internet for money to "end revenge porn." The money, of course, will go towards their own personal well-being. And it's a flexible funding campaign, which means they don't have to hit their $200,000 to keep the money.

The Indiegogo campaign could theoretically break some of Indiegogo's terms of use, including the rule that states that campaigners may not offer, sell or distribute "Items infringing or violating others’ Intellectual Property Rights, privacy rights or proprietary rights or wrongfully disclosing confidential information."

We've reached out to both Mr. Brittain and Indiegogo and will update when we hear back.

But hey, $50 will get you a t-shirt.

Update: Since reaching out to them, Indiegogo has pulled the campaign from its site. They haven't responded to us with comment.

Mr. Brittain (Photo: Twitter)

Craig Brittain, owner of the revenge porn hub Is Anybody Down, has borrowed a page from fellow revenge porn proprietor Hunter Moore.

Yesterday, in a tweet laden with remorse, Mr. Brittain announced that he is shutting down Is Anybody Down. After a number of self-pitying follow-ups on Twitter, he changed his bio to the rather emo, “Say good night to the bad guy.”

But, as we conjectured, it appears that Mr. Brittain was lying the whole time. On the same day that he announced he would be ending IAD, Mr. Brittain registered the domains ObamaNudes.com and ObamaNudes.net and transferred all of IAD's content over to them.

Getting Victims of Revenge Porn to Pay for Removing Images

On Is Anybody Down, Mr. Brittain offered a paid content removal service called "Takedown Hammer," which he claimed was run by an independent third party. However, investigations by the legal teams of the women suing him, as well as those by CBS News, revealed that Mr. Brittain and Takedown Hammer are one and the same. (Emails from both parties repeatedly come from the same I.P. address.)  ObamaNudes.com appears to be the same sort of racket, with a new ad to pay $300 for Takedown Hammer's services (up from $250).

In addition to the investigations conducted by CBS News in Denver, a Betabeat source posed as a victim of revenge porn and asked Takedown Hammer to remove her photos. The source embedded a code that tracked the IP addresses of where the emails were opened, and concluded that Mr. Brittain and the Takedown Hammer operate from the same location in Colorado Springs. The Daily Dot also reported something similar.

Why would Mr. Brittain start a whole new site after working so hard to establish Is Anybody Down? Perhaps because with the onslaught of news stories about him, IAD has landed him in a lot of hot water recently. Mr. Brittain may believe that by switching to a new domain, he can start fresh.

Hiring Men on PlentyofFish to Obtain Nude Images for the Site

A source alerted Betabeat to the fact that Mr. Brittain may have been actively hiring posters to obtain nude photos to populate Is Anybody Down. On September 21, 2012, an ad appeared on IAD for a "content acquisition specialist." The ad reads:

This is a commission-based position where you will be involved in the acquisition and submission of content to IAD as an independent contractor. No experience is necessary, we will train you. You must be 18+ and have valid identification information. Your information will be kept confidential. If you are or have ever been a member of law enforcement, any federal agency, etc. you are ineligible for this position and cannot contact us. For more information and to apply, please contact jobs@isanybodydown.com

One victim, who spoke to Betabeat under condition of anonymity, believes that this is how her photos ended up on IAD. She met a guy on PlentyofFish.com, whom she spoke to and hung out with for three weeks before he asked her to send him nude photos of herself.

"I of course wanted to make him happy, so sent him some topless pictures," the victim told Betabeat. "He ended things shortly after and on March 6th, almost a month after i sent him the pictures, my phone was beeping rapidly with new text messages all from numbers I didn't know." The photos that she had sent exclusively to the man she had been dating from Plenty of Fish had ended up on Is Anybody Down, and strangers who had seen her photos on the site began harassing her by calling both her cell phone and her work number.

"I answered the phone and a man was asking to speak to me and asked me if I knew there were nude pictures of me on a website called isanybodydown.com?" she continued. "I had just found out through all the texts messages and now men were calling my job looking for me. They asked my coworkers if I was attractive and if they wanted to see me naked."

The source believes that the man was hired by Is Anybody Down to court women and coax them into sending him naked photos. Once he obtained them, he abruptly ended the relationships and uploaded them to IAD.

The Legal Ramifications

Revenge porn hubs regularly invoke section 230 of in the Communications Decency Act, which states that website owners aren't responsible for user submitted content, to excuse their practices. But if IAD was paying posters to obtain nude photos from women and publish them to the site without their consent, Mr. Brittain may no longer be able to claim immunity under section 230.

Perhaps by switching to a new domain, Mr. Brittain believes he can escape potential legal consequences (one source told Betabeat a civil case is in the works against Mr. Brittain), but victims' rights advocates are hopeful that mounting media pressure will thrust him into the spotlight just enough to spur a police investigation.

"Perhaps Craig is going to pull the plug on IAD, but we certainly haven’t seen the last of Craig," said "Sarah," the anonymous woman behind victims' rights group End Revenge Porn. "As for the new domain that he created last night, Obamanudes.com, here’s hoping that it will draw the president’s attention to the issue of revenge porn!  Though I’m doubtful that it will, I’ll continue doing what I’m doing to bring awareness to this issue and to help its victims achieve justice."

Mr. Brittain (Photo: CBS Denver)

Update: Even As He Promises to Close ‘Is Anybody Down,’ Craig Brittain Covertly Plans a New Revenge Porn Site

This afternoon Craig Brittain, the proprietor of revenge porn platform Is Anybody Down, announced on his Twitter feed that the site will be shutting down. In a series of tweets, Mr. Brittain wrote that the site, which allows scorned lovers to upload intimate photos of their exes without consent, will shut down entirely within 24 hours. "The website, Is Anybody Down, will completely end," he tweeted.

Mr. Brittain said he would provide more information soon and that the site is not being shuttered because of outside pressures, but instead because he "made a personal decision to end Is Anybody Down."

Is Anybody Down cropped up as a copycat of Hunter Moore's notorious Is Anyone Up, after Mr. Moore sold off IAU as a prank. The site has landed Mr. Brittain in a lot of hot water recently. Is Anybody Down purports to have an independent partnership with Takedown Hammer, a service that will strip your naked photo from Is Anybody Down for a $250 fee. Several sources have told Betabeat that they have definitive proof that Takedown Hammer is also operated by Mr. Brittain. CBS News Denver employed a security researcher to do an investigation, who determined that the emails from Mr. Brittain and the person supposedly running Takedown Hammer were sent from the same IP address. Mr. Brittain denied the findings.

Another investigation conducted by CBS Denver found that Mr. Brittain had posed as women on Craigslist in order to collect naked photos of women to populate Is Anybody Down.

Mr. Brittain has historically been rather flip about his practices--"I call it entertainment," he said recently of the site--but his tweets seem to indicate that he's had a change of heart. "A number of reasons contributed to my decision to end Is Anybody Down. Mostly my personal feelings," he tweeted, adding, "The realization that my life is empty without love and friendship is really the biggest motivating factor behind the change."

He continues:

https://twitter.com/CraigRSBrittain/status/319917883931103232

https://twitter.com/CraigRSBrittain/status/319918047160827904

https://twitter.com/CraigRSBrittain/status/319918320067420160

https://twitter.com/CraigRSBrittain/status/319918463500034048

Though the tweets seem sincere, they're worth taking with a grain of salt. Mr. Moore, whom Mr. Brittain has modeled himself after over the last year, also appeared to have a change of heart before enthusiastically diving back into the revenge porn industry.

Mr. Brittain also updated his Twitter bio:

Just a boy who wanted to be loved, but never was. The last of my kind, they don't make people like me anymore. Say good night to the bad guy.

Mr. Brittain (Photo: CBS4-Denver)

Craig Brittain, the 28-year-old operator of the revenge porn website Is Anybody Down, may have obtained some of the site's photos by catfishing women on Craigslist. According to an investigation by CBS Denver. Mr. Brittain reportedly pretended to be a woman on Craigslist's W4W section where he solicited nude photos from unsuspecting women.

CBS Denver quotes a woman who communicated with someone named "Jess Davis" on Craigslist in August 2010. Ms. Davis sent compromising photos to the woman, and then requested some back, along with the woman's name, birthday and phone number. The woman sent the information back along with a handful of photos, and never heard from Ms. Davis again. Five days later, the photos showed up on Is Anybody Down.

CBS Denver hired a computer security expert named Dr. Nicholas Weaver from the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley who determined that the email from Jess Davis was sent from the same IP address that Mr. Brittain was using at the time. "Thus the natural conclusion is that it is almost certain that Craig Brittain composed the 'Jess Davis' emails and therefore was actively soliciting for content… by tricking victims into providing compromising photographs for his site,” Dr. Weaver told CBS.

Furthermore, a reverse image source reportedly revealed that the photos used to represent "Jess Davis" were actually taken from the Is Anybody Down archives.

Revenge porn proprietors often say they are protected by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields website owners from being responsible for the content submitted to them by users. However, if Mr. Brittain was actively working to find content to put up on the site, he may no longer be protected by section 230, making it much easier to bring a federal case against him.

" If they find that site operators are contributing to the content then there’s some chink in the armor, or if they make promises they’ll take something off and don’t, it’s not covered [by section 230]," University of Maryland law professor and cyberstalking expert Danielle Citron told Betabeat. "If his conduct is contributing and creating conduct that’s criminal, that could be the chink in the armor of section 230."

In recent months, victims have filed lawsuits against revenge porn proprietors with increasing frequency. In addition to the class action suit filed by several victims in Texas against Texxxan.com, a criminal case was launched recently against the site. The Orange County Sherriff's Department is working alongside the FBI after three underage women came forward saying that they had found their explicit photos on Texxxan.com.

In the midst of CBS Denver’s investigation, Mr. Brittain left comments on Betabeat expressing his disstate over a photo of him that we used to illustrate a post. We reached out to Mr. Brittain via email, but he did not respond. He did, however, address the report on Twitter last night.

"CBS4 story is another Nicholas Weaver/Marco Randazza fabrication. No truth to it at all. These women are told to lie by their attorneys," Mr. Brittain tweeted.

Ms. Toups (Photo: Twitter)

John S. Morgan, the lawyer helping victims of revenge porn site Texxxan.com launch a class action suit against the site and its host GoDaddy.com, announced today that two more women have signed on to the claim. Unlike Hollie Toups, the 32-year-old Beaumont, Texas resident who came forward in order to encourage others to confront their struggles with revenge porn, these two victims are allegedly underage. New allegations of child pornography further muddle the already complex case--the most aggressive legal action taken against revenge porn thus far.

The release says that the women have filed an amended cause of action against Hunter Thomas Taylor, the 24-year-old proprietor of Texxxan.com, as well as his parents, whose Internet connection (and occasionally their credit card) was used to maintain the site. The claim also names Austin Ray Ponthieu, whom Mr. Morgan described as the site administrator.

Mr. Morgan said he has found at least two underage victims whose photos were uploaded to the site. The victims have signed onto the suit along with their parents. Mr. Morgan is working with the FBI to report the instances of underage pornography that he says he's encountered while building the case. "I'm a civil lawyer," he told Betabeat. "We enjoy the opportunity to work with law enforcement because this is such an important issue, but ultimately the FBI makes its own decision on how it handles criminal investigations. My indications are that the FBI is taking this very, very seriously and is going to do a very thorough and excellent job prosecuting people for underage photos."

The case will be pursued under state law instead of federal law, as the victims and proprietors are all located in Texas. Mr. Morgan argues that uploading and hosting photos on the site without subjects' permission is "invasion of privacy, unauthorized use of name or likeness and what we call negligence or gross negligence: that their actions were completely negligent because they didn't think about the ramifications."

Mr. Morgan also said he is going to continue to add defendants to the case. "I'm going to try to start listing the people who have uploaded the photos as defendants and start listing the subscribers once we attain that information," he said.

According to Mr. Morgan, Mr. Taylor lives with his parents in Orange, Texas, and was the anonymous "James Smith" who called in to the Anderson Live two week ago in a segment about revenge porn. Little other information is known about Mr. Taylor.

Ms. Toups, however, said that she knows Mr. Ponthieu, whom Mr. Morgan said was the Texxxan.com web administrator. "Austin used to date a friend of mine so that's how I met him," Ms. Toups told Betabeat. "He's been around me and that makes it a little bit more disturbing." Ms. Toups said she lives about a 15 minute drive from where both Mr. Ponthieu and Mr. Taylor reside in Orange, Texas. "The only thing that separates us is a body of water and a bridge," she added. "I talked to some of the other girls and you just assume it's some creep that lives far away."

Ms. Toups and the other women involved in the Texxxan.com suit have served as a lightning rod for the controversy, encouraging other women to discuss their struggles with revenge porn. Last week, two women in Colorado spoke out against Craig Brittain, the founder of the website Is Anybody Down.

"It's kind of like the beginning of a healing process because for so long of course they've been hiding and kind of controlling our lives from the shadows," Ms. Toups said. "To be able to know who it is, it's kind of like forcing them to be held accountable for their actions. I know people have said before that we made the choice to take the photos and to deal with it. Well, they made this choice, so now they have to deal with the consequences."

Below is the press release and the updated claim. We emailed an address for Texxxan.com and calls to a listing for a home number for Mr. Taylor were unanswered.

Texxxan.com Lawsuit - Press Release and Amended Complaint by Adam Steinbaugh

A very "old" photo of Mr. Brittain.

Here at Betabeat, we've done some extensive reporting on the scourge of "revenge porn" websites, places where scorned exes or angry friends can upload intimate photos of women--and sometimes men--without their consent. Victims of revenge porn have been sexually and violently harassed, lost jobs and friends and even had to change their names because their photos ended up on one of the numerous revenge porn hubs.

Now, many women are bravely fighting back in a class action lawsuit against one site and its hosting provider, GoDaddy. Hackers, lawyers and activists are working diligently to confront a complex legal issue. Still, revenge porn sites continue to operate largely unaffected, despite the fact that more and more victims are speaking out about what happened to them.

“I call it entertainment,” Craig Brittain, the proprietor of Is Anybody Down, told CBS News earlier this week. “We don’t want anyone shamed or hurt, we just want the pictures there for entertainment purposes and business. I would say our business goal is to become big and profitable.”

Mr. Brittain also allegedly runs a service, Takedown Hammer, which charges $250 to remove the photos. He claimed Takedown Hammer is helmed by a New York-based lawyer named David Blade III, but several news outlets (including ours) have attempted to track him down and determined that no such person exists. Recently Mr. Brittain admitted Takedown Hammer is run by one of his friends.

In the post that we wrote about victims coming out against Is Anybody Down, Mr. Brittain himself took to our comments section. He did not defend his actions or seek to shed some light on just why he's decided to make a living ruining other people's lives. Instead, he took issue with the photo we had used of him, which he said was very old.

We find it rich that Mr. Brittain would take issue with the photo, given that he makes money publishing photos of others without their consent, right next to contact information and screencaps of their Facebook profiles. Mr. Brittain has said in interviews that his site helps desensitize people to intimate photos so that having naked pictures on the web won't hinder getting hired. To get so miffed by a clothed picture of yourself that you're compelled to leave a comment about it seems particularly laughable in comparison.

So, we'll swap out the old photo for a new one--if you pay our "friend" $250.

Mr. Brittain

When Hunter Moore shut down Is Anyone Up, the web’s most notorious revenge porn site, a host of copycat sites quickly cropped up to fill the void, though none have come close to generating as much traffic as Mr. Moore’s.

One called Is Anybody Down, however, goes a step beyond humiliating people by posting their naked photos without consent. The site claims to hold an "independent" partnership with another site that charges a $250 fee for the removal of photos. Now several women in Colorado are speaking out against its founder, Craig Brittain, and these extortionist policies.

CBS News reports that two women have agreed to come forward and speak about Is Anybody Down with the hopes that other women will begin to talk about their experiences with similar sites. Their statement comes two weeks after Hollie Toups and 23 other women filed a class action lawsuit in Texas against Texxxan.com and its host GoDaddy in an attempt to break the stigma for victims of revenge porn.

“I call it entertainment,” Colorado-based Mr. Brittain, the site's proprietor, told CBS News. “We don’t want anyone shamed or hurt we just want the pictures there for entertainment purposes and business. I would say our business goal is to become big and profitable.” So far, he said he makes about $3,000 a month off of ads hosted on the site.

Marc Randazza, a Nevada-based lawyer who has made it his mission to defend victims of revenge porn, claims that in addition to posting non-consensual intimate photos of women, Is Anybody Down also flirts with a form of thinly-masked digital extortion.The site offers a partnership with an “independent” organization called Takedown Hammer, which purports to scrub your photos from Is Anybody Down—but only if you pay them $250.

Is Anybody Down features ads for Takedown Hammer across its site, and a link called “Get Me Off This Site!” takes you to a post about Takedown Hammer’s success in removing its clients’ photos from Is Anybody Down. Takedown Hammer claims to be operated by a New York-based lawyer named David Blade, III, but no such name appears in the New York State Unified Court System’s attorney database.

Mr. Randazza told Betabeat in December that he has conversed extensively with the profiteers of Is Anybody Down. After studying the IP addresses associated with the computers of Is Anybody Down’s owner Mr. Brittain and the owner of Takedown Hammer, he said that the two sites are definitely both run by Mr. Brittain.

“I have clear and convincing evidence that the exact same IP address is being used by both emails from the Takedown Hammer and Is Anybody Down,” Mr. Randazza told Betabeat. “Unless Craig and David Blade were sitting in the same room at the same computer and then they just switched places at the keyboard within seconds of each other, these guys are the same person.”

CBS News employed a computer security investigator who also determined that the emails from Mr. Brittain and Mr. Blade came from the same IP address. Mr. Brittain denies the allegation, though said he could not produce contact information for Mr. Blade.

Though posting private, naked photos of people and then asking for $250 to have them removed sounds an awful lot like digital extortion, because courts have never dealt with revenge porn sites before, there isn’t a legal precedent set for how to navigate such a situation. But with more and more women speaking out and taking site profiteers to court, that may soon change.