United States of America

[US] Owner of a “revenge porn” website sentenced to 18 years in prison

IRIS 2015-6:1/38

Jonathan Perl

Locus Telecommunications, Inc.

The San Diego Attorney General announced, on 4 April 2015, that the owner of a now-offline "revenge porn" website based in California was sentenced to 18 years in prison, after being charged with 31 felony counts, including conspiracy, identity theft and extortion. The owner was convicted of six counts of extortion and 21 counts of identity theft for developing a website that allowed people to post explicit images of people without their permission, allowed users to post personal information of the people in the pictures without their consent and solicited payments in $250 to $350 increments from people who wanted to have the photographs deleted. Over the course of its operations, the site had 10170 photos and generated nearly $30000 of revenue from payments for removal of the pictures.

The California Attorney General lauded the decision and expressed their continued commitment to investigate and prosecute people who commit these types of acts. The defendant’s attorney admitted that he made moral transgressions, but maintained their belief, that he was not legally responsible for the pictures, these being submitted by others.


References



This article has been published in IRIS Legal Observations of the European Audiovisual Observatory.