- [Kevin] Deep in the recesses of the Internet, you can find some terrible
things. One of the worst is revenge porn, nude photos and videos of people that are
posted online without their consent, often by their exes. It's been estimated that
90% of revenge porn victims are women, and lots of state governments have started to
make it illegal to post revenge porn. But hosting it is still legal, and in Dayton,
Ohio, a man named Scott Breitenstein is running one of the most notorious revenge
porn sites in the world.
He's been called the worst man on the Internet, and I'm going
to meet him. I'm in Dayton, Ohio. Dayton is not exactly where you'd expect to find
a story about technology or the future. It's a pretty average rust belt Ohio city.
But there's a guy who lives here named Scott Breitenstein. You probably haven't
heard of him, but he has changed the lives of thousands of people on the Internet for
the worse.
A couple of years ago, Scott started a site called Complaints Bureau
because he bought a bad TV. But over the years, it morphed into a hub for revenge
porn. It's a new kind of crime made possible by the rise of the Internet. And
I don't know how Scott sleeps at night but that's what I'm going to figure out. This
is Scott's house, where he lives with his wife and son. It's also where he runs
Complaints Bureau and two other sites, STD Registry and Report My Ex. He's never
given an interview before and it took a while to convince him, but eventually he
and Preston Lawson, a moderator for Complaints Bureau, agreed to show me
behind the scenes of their revenge porn empire.
- [Scott] Would you like to see the office?
- Sure.
- If you've been ripped off or a company has done you wrong or whatever, you just
head on over there to the site and file a complaint.
- And what are the different sections there?
- Taxes, bad business partners, loans.
- Which one gives you the most trouble?
- Revenge porn. Here's one here, a schoolteacher. Whore by night, elementary
school third grade teacher by day.
- That's her address and...?
- Yeah. It's got a picture of her school, email.
- And then those other pictures are her naked?
- Yes.
- How many times has it been visited?
- 982,556.
- Nine hundred and eighty two thousand times?
- Yep.
- Wow. On a typical day, what's in your email inbox? What are people sending you?
- [Preston] A lot of it is wanting something taken down or wanting an
explanation why this was posted, who posted it. A lot of it won't be even
replied to in a lot of cases.
- They'll try to do every measure possible to try to get it taken down, so what they
do is they file a DMCA complaint, Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We disable it
for 72 hours but within 10 days, 10 to 14 business days, if they don't file for an
injunction, then the post is going back up. That wastes us our time, so what we do
is we charge them $10,000.
- If I'm a woman whose nude photos ended up on Complaints Bureau and I try to get
them taken down, I could end up getting sued by you--
- Right.
- For $10,000?
- Yep.
- Scott also optimizes Complaints Bureau's search engine rankings so that people's
revenge porn is often the first thing that comes up when you Google their names. How
much money do you make off these sites? I make about $1200 a month on Complaints
Bureau. STD Registry and Report My Ex, some months it's $600, some months it's
$900, sometimes $500. It just varies.
- And where does that money come from?
- Google.
- Like Google Ads?
- Yes.
- So in some ways, he's carved out this bizarre niche in the Internet economy. He
is the bottom feeder. He is taking the worst parts of the Internet and giving
them a home, and there's a business in that, as horrible as it is and as much as
we hate to see it. There's money to be made doing what he's doing.
- How the law is set up is the site is not responsible for the revenge porn. It's the
person that uploads the revenge porn. There's no law--
- Right. So do you agree what you're doing is immoral?
- A lot of people has feelings, but to a certain point, I still believe that if a
person is a bad person and they're cheating and they're letting every guy out
there and a girl or guy gets naked and says, "Here, take my picture," I think
people need to know about it.
- Have there been other moderators?
- We've had some anonymous ones, people we didn't want actually known to the public
because when you put your name out there, there's a whole lot that rides along with
that.
- Yeah. You wouldn't want to violate anyone's privacy.
- Right.
- What stuff is definitely not allowed in the site? What would you take down
immediately if you saw it?
- Underage pornography because I just don't tolerate it. Me being a Christian
anyway. That's not right.
- She sent this one here. It says, "Remove this profile and pictures. They are child
pornography. I'm only 15 years old. Please remove these nude pictures immediately or
I will contact the police. Thank you." My moderator typed her, "Within a 48-hour
period, we will need you to send us a photo ID/birth certificate so we can
disable the post or the material that is claimed to be child pornography."
- Are those photos still up?
- Yes. She never sent the copies.
- And you wouldn't want to err on the safe side and just take it down anyway?
- I can't sit there and monitor or be in that person's life knowing who's telling
the truth or who's lying. You see what I'm saying?
- I can understand why someone like Scott would want a job like running Complaints
Bureau. It makes him feel important. With one tap of his keyboard, he has the power
to make or break entire people's lives. And
when you're living in that kind of house, in this kind of neighborhood, in this kind
of city, something that makes you feel powerful is pretty tempting. This is not
where you would expect to find the most hated man on the Internet.
- That's right.
- What are some of the things people have said about you?
- They said I'm an Internet terrorist. They say I control the Internet. I'm
mob-affiliated. It's nuts. But a lot of people love the site. There was one bad
thing. Homeland Security shut down Complaints Bureau for a year.
- Why?
- One of the terrorists had got on there and uploaded videos, I guess, where they
cut a man's head off and we were ordered to take it down. But like I said, we get
ordered all the time to take stuff down but we never do.
- Have you ever been shut down other than that?
- By a hacker. Anonymous. Had shut us down. He thought the site was a disgrace
to the country.
- When you meet people for the first time, do you tell them what you do?
- No. I don't tell them about the site.
- Why not?
- Because you never know they might be on there.
- Have you had to switch hosting providers a lot?
- A lot. So what we did is moved the site to France, so basically any laws that
occur doesn't apply over in France because it's France law.
- Do you think of running the site as fun, or is that more of just work?
- I won't call it fun. I call it probably a headache, but it's a job.
- I wanted Scott to see the effects of revenge porn on the people it harms, so I
asked Annmarie Chiarini, a Victim Services Director with the Cyber Civil Rights
Initiative and a victim of revenge porn herself, to record a video message for
him. Scott, can I play something for you? I have a video.
- Yeah.
- Just press the spacebar.
- [Annmarie] I was asked to deliver a message to you about the experience of
being a victim of revenge porn. I am not going to describe the shame and life
expense I and other victims endured. Rather, I will give examples of the shame
that society casts on you and your revenge porn colleagues.
- It seemed like he wasn't quite connecting it, like he just couldn't get
that this affects people and that complaining about a business is not the
same as posting nude pictures of your ex.
- What you're doing may or may not be illegal but ethically it is corrupt.
Anybody who provides a photo for people to become the sexual entertainment of others
is a dangerous sexual predator.
- There's another thing on the site that I found last night that I wanted to ask you
about. This is a woman who was posted on the revenge porn site and the headline is
"Very Filthy Slutty Bisexual Whore." It starts off, "She's nice and likes it in
the ass. She will meet you and fall in love with you. Without your
acknowledgment, she will claim to be your friend, stalk you and then terrorize your
girlfriend or anyone she feels is a threat." And there are nude photos of her
and then someone saying that she's her and gets in the comments and says, "The person
who posted these has stalked and harassed me for months. I was involved with him for
a year. When I wanted to break up with him, he threatened me with these pics. He
used to always beat me. He would punch me in the stomach because he said it wouldn't
leave bruises punching a woman there. I finally broke up with him in December
2013, but after all these months he still won't stop. I would rather be dead, naked,
homeless and humiliated than be with him. I even had to get a protective order
against him." If you had seen that, would you have taken the post down?
- Absolutely.
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- I don't think he's ever been face to face with someone who was on the site
before. I think that was a really powerful thing for him to see and I think it
affected him deeply, and I hope that it causes him to think even more deeply about
what he's doing. The future is going to be filled with many, many more Scotts and
many, many more Complaints Bureaus, and that scares me. We need to come together
and figure out what to do about this because it's an epidemic, and who knows
how many more lives are going to be ruined by revenge porn?
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