Revenge porn $lap
Sleazyy site loses ad bacbacker after Post exposé
An offshore site that hosts hoards of “revenge porn” — including illegal shots of underage girls — lost its sole source of revenue Friday following a Post exposé of its operation.
A major online ad company said it was pulling its business from Anon-IB — also known as the “Best Anonymous Image Board” — and thanked The Post “for making us aware of this.”
Anon-IB was raking in $1,500 a day in ad revenue from Barcelona-based ExoClick, according to an estimate from the Webmonitoring firm Alexa.
“ExoClick has a zero-tolerance policy to any forms of illegal content on publisher websites (as per our guidelines),” spokesman Giles Hirst wrote in an e-mail statement.
“On discovery of such content, we will always take swift action to remove ads and ban the publisher from our network,” he wrote.
Several women told The Post that nude images taken when they were as young as 16 have appeared on Anon-IB.
Paige Rines of New Hampshire said she was “anonymously messaged hateful things” once her photos were posted, and had to abandon plans to work as a counselor to troubled teens.
“If anyone looked up my name, no one would let me work with children,” lamented Rines, now 23.
Anon-IB also recently featured a collage of what appeared to be adolescent girls with their breasts exposed.
Under federal law, possessing or distributing naked and “sexually suggestive” images of anyone under 18 can be punishable by up to life in prison.
Anon-IB has been hosting illegally obtained content for years — including hacked nudes of Jennifer Lawrence that surfaced in 2014 and photos of female US Marines posted earlier this year — and it’s unclear why the feds haven’t taken action.
The FBI has declined to comment, but a law-enforcement source said officials may be leaving it in business to track users’ Internet addresses so they can be prosecuted.
Two recent FBI probes — 2011’s Operation Torpedo and 2015’s Operation Pacifier — used malware to infect several sites hosting kiddie porn, lead- ing to the arrests of more than 350 US-based perverts and more than 500 overseas.
The Queens District Attorney’s Office has told The Post that Anon-IB is based in Panama. But the site frequently changes its Web address and currently has one that is assigned to the country of Laos.
Anon-IB did not immediately return a request for comment.
Gabrielle Fonrouge’s exposé on revenge porn in Friday’s Post got one instant result: ExoClick, the Barcelona-based advertising firm, just quit using the site Anon-IB — costing the filth merchants $1,500 a day in ad revenues.
Revenge porn is the sharing of nude photos of a woman or girl without consent, usually by an ex-lover. It’s a grotesque violation — a sick psychic assault. And, as Fonrouge reported, it can ruin a victim’s life.
Anon-I B, aka Anonymous Image Board, is one of the Web’s chief promoters of revenge porn. The site plainly includes many images of underage girls — yet the FBI seems uninterested in any criminal probe.
New FBI chief Andrew McCabe might want to rethink that. Maybe President Trump could suggest it to Attorney General Jeff Sessions?
Here in New York, the Legislature needs to act: Posting revenge porn isn’t even a crime in this state, and a bill to outlaw it has languished for three years — even as 38 states have done the right thing. (City Councilman Rory Lancman is doing what he can, pushing to make it at least a misdemeanor in the five boroughs.)
Anon-IB users regularly request and trade “wins” — photos of specific women, often ID’d by her high school and graduating class or even by name. It’s rank.
But even if, as we hope, The Post has scored a fatal blow against that site, its mysterious owners will likely just open another one — and probably find advertisers, too.
The tech industry should step up here, and start finding ways to help police the Internet.
If Big Tech’s much-vaunted social consciousness can’t overrule its libertarian ethos on this front, Americans will grow even more certain that all it really cares about is its own profits.