The California attorney general's office says it has arrested the operator of a "revenge porn" website that illegally posted more than 10,000 sexually explicit photographs of individuals alongside their personal identifying information without consent.
State Attorney General Kamala Harris (pictured above) announced Tuesday the arrest of 27-year-old Kevin Christopher Bollaert, of San Diego, who allegedly ran the website "ugotposted.com." Bollaert is not only charged with crimes related to posting the photos, but also extorting a total of more than $10,000 from victims wishing to have their photos removed from the site which was in operation from December 2012 until September 2013.
See also: It's Still Easy to Get Away With Revenge Porn
“This website published intimate photos of unsuspecting victims and turned their public humiliation and betrayal into a commodity with the potential to devastate lives,” Harris said in a statement.
Court documents list multiple felony charges against Bollaert, including 28 counts of identity theft, two counts of extortion and one count of conspiracy. He is said to have conspired with unknown individuals who submitted the victims' photos and identifying information.
Those attempting to upload photos to ugotposted.com could not do so unless they also submitted the full name, address, age and social media profiles of the photo's subject, according to the criminal complaint against Bollaert filed by Brian Cardwell, a special agent for the California Department of Justice's eCrime Unit.
In his criminal complaint, Cardwell writes that victims asking to have their photos removed from ugotposted.com were directed to another site — changemyreputation.com — which Bollaert is also accused of running. At changemyreputation.com, victims could pay a fee ranging from about $250 to $350 to have their information removed, according to court documents and the California attorney general.
Bollaert is said to have received thousands of emails from victims. Between June 20 and Aug. 26, the email address yougotposted@gmail.com, which was the public email address for the site, received some 2,000 emails with more than half of them containing the word "remove," according to Cardwell's investigation. One victim wrote that she was "scared for [her] life" while another wrote she was "getting nonstop harassing messages."
"Yeah, I realize like this is not a good situation ," Bollaert said in an interview with Cardwell and another agent on Sept. 18, according to the complaint against Bollaert. "I feel bad about the whole thing and like I just don't want to do it anymore. I mean I know a lot of people are getting screwed over like on the site. Like their lives are getting ruined."
Bollaert is said to have told the agents, at this same interview, that he voluntarily shut down ugotposted.com, stating, "at the beginning, it was fun and entertaining, but now it's just like ruining my life." He told the agents he was received about a hundred emails per day from people wanting to have photos removed, and that he earned between $800 and $900 each month from advertisements posted on the site, according to the criminal complaint.
The attorney general charges that Bollaert committed identity theft because it's illegal in California to use someone's personal information for any illegal purpose, including to obtain, credit, goods, services or money.
This case does not pertain to California's new revenge porn ban, which Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law on Oct. 1, several weeks after Bollaert supposedly closed ugotposted.com.
Bollaert faces an unspecified amount of jail time and fees, according to the California attorney general, and is currently being detained in San Diego County jail on $50,000 bail.
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Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images