Photoplunder and Reddit's Involuntary-Imagery Communities

Separate from the better-known creepshots and jailbait controversies, Reddit hosted a cluster of communities built around sharing images of women taken or obtained without their consent. One strand centred on r/photobucketplunder, later rebranded r/photoplunder, which sourced private and semi-private personal photos — including intimate images — from the photo-hosting service Photobucket and reposted them, often re-uploaded elsewhere to obscure the origin. The community grew to roughly 44,000 subscribers.

In August 2012, Photobucket pushed back, serving takedown notices on the relevant communities and citing the practice known as 'fusking' — systematically guessing file URLs to pull non-public album contents. The targeted subreddit went dark, but a successor quickly reappeared under the r/photoplunder name with the Photobucket references scrubbed. A related criminal dimension emerged in 2014, when two men were arrested over a fusking tool used to harvest private Photobucket images, with the stolen material feeding downstream harassment and extortion.

A parallel strand was r/CandidFashionPolice, which surfaced after Reddit banned r/creepshots in late 2012. It hosted covertly taken photos of women in public under a thin 'fashion critique' framing, functioning largely as a redirect and archive for the banned creepshots material.

Reddit's response in this era was inconsistent and reactive — the Photobucket communities were curbed by a third party's legal enforcement rather than a policy action, and banned communities repeatedly re-formed under new names. Reddit did not adopt a site-wide ban on non-consensual sexual imagery until February 2015, and later reporting found r/photoplunder still active afterward.