That's not true. There was an article that recently crossed the front page of HN by a victim of one of these sites, and her research revealed that a large fraction (possibly over half, I don't remember) of victims gas their photos obtained by hacking, not by a vengeful ex who already had legal access to the photos.

40% hacked, 36% revenge porn, 12% photoshopped, 12% self-submits.[1]

[1] http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/charlotte-laws-hunte...

I cringed when I saw "informal survey," but this seems to be in the important bit -

"In most cases, the scam began through Facebook and ended when “Gary Jones” gained access to the victim’s email account."

Unfortunately it doesn't make a lot of sense without context that I can't fine in the article. Was it phishing?

Sadly it's not very clear, and it wasn't a random representative sampling, but it's the closest thing we have to any actual figures right now (AFAIK)

I read an article a week or two ago about a mother that was a former private investigator researching the owner of one of these sites. She claimed that a lot of the women featured on the site had their info gathered by someone hacking their gmail account. I'll search for a link when I'm not at work. Don't really want revenge porn showing up in my search history here.

When has the media ever had a good handle on what "hacking" means and how prevalent it is?

Why would someone with the ability to "hack" a large number of gmail accounts choose nude photos to make their money with? I can't imagine the payoff is comparatively good and large-scale blackmail is a pretty good way to get targeted for prosecution.

Further, aren't these pictures in their email because they were sent to someone? How would the average person distinguish between their account being "hacked" for the purpose of retrieving the picture opposed to the receiver sharing it? It sounds more like the instinctual "my account was hacked!" response to something embarrassing.

What, you don't email yourself a copy of all your nude selfies for safe keeping? I thought everybody did that.

edit to add: wow. From the xojane link it appears that's actually exactly what everybody does. I'm at a loss for words.

To many people, email is how they move files about.

Yeah, I know. Done it myself. I was mentally filtering nude selfies out of the set of files I would want to move about. I draw a distinction between "here's a sweet recipe for chicken alfredo, better save this for later" and "here's a picture of me naked, better make a copy in case I need this later", but I guess others don't.