'Revenge porn' purveyor Hunter Moore indicted by FBI

27-year-old "revenge porn" distributor Hunter Moore was arrested by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials on Thursday and indicted on charges of conspiring to hack into hundreds of victims' email accounts to gather content for his activities, Mother Jones reported.

Moore and 25-year-old Charles Evens were also accused of seven counts of unauthorized access to a protected computer and seven counts of aggravated identity theft. The indictment states that Evens would gain access to victims' nude pictures and other informations, which he would then sell to Moore for use on his website, IsAnyoneUp.com.

Moore has argued in the past that IsAnyoneUp operated legally because the content -- often pictures and private information of naked women -- were submitted by other users, thus protecting him even in cases where the material was posted without the victims' consent.

But authorities said in the indictment that Moore emailed Evens in October 2011 offering to pay him $200 a week through an "anonymous" PayPal account for providing nude pictures for the site, and suggesting they create separate email accounts to avoid detection.

In March 2013, Moore was ordered by a district court to pay $250,000 to anti-bullying activist James McGibney for falsely accusing him of being a pedophile. McGibney shuttered IsAnyoneUp.com in 2012 after convincing Moore to sell him the domain.

Tech news site Techdirt reported that Moore was indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which has been criticized by activists for allegedly being too broad.

"At first glance, this lawsuit looks like a much more legitimate application of the law," TechDirt noted. "At the very least, hopefully, this suggests that existing laws can often be used legitimately against bad actors, without having to upend the basic legal framework of the internet."