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SALT LAKE CITY — Melissa Esplin, a Utah mom and professional blogger, is amazed at the kindness of strangers after one helped her combat cyber bullying.
Esplin's clean pictures appeared on a revenge porn website — along with explicit pictures, her name and links to her social media profiles. KSL’s story was picked up by national outlets — and that’s when Wayne Genualdi saw the story.
Instead of working with the revenge porn site, Genualdi worked with the website’s registrar to get Esplin’s pictures taken down and now hopes to get the entire revenge porn site removed.
He also has this advice to those who may end up in a similar situation for reporting content.
1. File a report on www.ic3.gov. This alerts the FBI to the issue. If the site is based in the United States, authorities can work to get the information taken down.
2. If contacting the site doesn’t work — or, as in Melissa’s case, asks you for money to remove content — find the domain registrar and web host using a tool like www.domaintools.com. It works similar to a phone book but for websites, and will give you information about the back-end of the site.
3. Upon looking up the domain registration information, contact the registrar about the offensive content. Often the site host or registrar will have policies against a client uploading illegal or copyrighted content. Some may ban porn altogether. Genualdi suggests contacting them through the company’s website, not email addresses provided on domaintools.com.
4. If the domain host does not help, try finding the web host. This is the more complicated option. Use domaintools.com again to look up the website you want to report. Then click on the Server Stats tab and the DNS Lookup link. You can then look up the information on these nameservers (the nameservers usually begin with "ns.", "ns1.", "ns2.", etc.) listed by clicking on one of the links for them. This should point you to the web host. You will then have a company name to pursue.
Because revenge porn laws are being passed in several states — including in Utah during the recent legislative session — Genualdi believes that this could be a problem that could fade as people face consequences.
“I think within the next couple of years these websites will probably be taken down,” he said via email. “I would not be surprised if the people running (the revenge site) are arrested.”
