Arrest made in Miss Teen USA ‘Sextortion photos’ case
Arrest made in Miss Teen USA ‘Sextortion photos’ case
Posted on: 6:37 am, September 27, 2013, by CNN Wire,
updated on: 09:16am, September 27, 2013
TEMECULA, Calif. — A college student was arrested
Thursday for allegedly hijacking the webcams of young women — among them
reigning Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf — taking nude images, then blackmailing his
victims to send him more explicit material or else be exposed.
Jared James Abrahams, a 19-year-old computer science
student from Temecula, California, surrendered on Thursday to the FBI on
federal extortion charges, the agency announced.
Authorities say he victimized young women
surreptitiously, by taking control of their computers then photographing them
as they changed out of their clothes.
When he admitted what he’d done in June, Abrahams said he
had 30 to 40 “slave computers” — or other people’s electronic devices he
controlled — and has had as many as 150 total, according to a criminal
complaint.
His arrest came six months after a teenager identified in
court documents as C.W. alerted authorities. She has since publicly identified
herself as Cassidy Wolf, the recently crowned Miss Teen USA. She touted news
reports of her alleged tormenter’s arrest on her Twitter feed.
At the time she contacted police, in March, Wolf was not
a national figure — even though she was Miss Teen California — and lived in an
apartment and attended Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa.
Wolf got a Facebook alert that someone had tried to
change her password to the social networking site, then noticed other passwords
had been changed and that her Twitter avatar was now a half-nude picture of
herself.
A short time later, she received what would be the first
of many messages, this one featuring pictures of Wolf at her Riverside County
address and others apparently taken months earlier when she lived in Orange
County, says the criminal complaint. The message explained “what’s going to
happen” if Wolf didn’t send pictures or videos or “do what I tell you to do” in
a five-minute Skype videoconference, according to the criminal complaint.
“Either you do one of the things listed below or I upload
these pics and a lot more (I have a LOT more and those are better quality) on
all your accounts for everybody to see and your dream of being a model will be
transformed into a pornstar (sic),” he wrote.
Recalling that day, Wolf told NBC’s “Today” show she
started “screaming (and) bawling my eyes out.”
“I wasn’t sure what to do,” she said in August, shortly
after her Miss Teen USA win. “So it was terrifying.”
The messenger had taken great efforts to hide his online
identity. But investigators were eventually able to find corresponding e-mails,
IP addresses and other communications they linked to Abraham. They also tied
him to online forums asking about malware, how to control webcams, and hacking
into Facebook accounts.
Investigators also linked him to at least eight other
young women — some of them, like Wolf, from Southern California, though others
were from as far away as Moldova. The victims told authorities similar stories:
of a person they did not know saying, and in some cases proving, he had nude
images and making demands as a result.
The stalker claimed to have 1,000 photographs of one
woman, the complaint said. When she asked, “Why are you doing this to me?” the
response was, “I told you I’ll answer any questions after you Skype.”
As an FBI agent was speaking by phone to this young
woman, she logged onto her Instagram account to find it populated by nude
pictures of her, the complaint said.
A few young women apparently complied with the demands
for a Skype session. The man promised not to record the sessions and he made it
look like he was erasing the nude pictures of them. One such session was found
on the suspect’s phone, police said.
Investigators examining e-mail exchanges found one in
which an alleged victim wrote she was downloading Skype and pleading, “Please
remember im only 17. Have a heart.”
“I’ll tell you this right now! I do NOT have a heart!!!”
he wrote back, per the complaint.
“However I do stick to my deals! Also age doesn’t mean a
thing to me.”
Authorities executed a search warrant at Abrahams’ home
on June 4, at which time he “voluntarily agreed to speak” with a pair of FBI
agents. Describing himself in that interview as a college freshman who was good
with computers, the complaint said, he admitted using malware and his expertise
to “watch his victims change their clothes and … use the photographs against
them.”
Abrahams further admitted the e-mail accounts, VPN,
domain names or other pieces of the electronic puzzle that investigators used
to build a case were his, according to the criminal complaint.
There were no publicly listed phone numbers for Abrahams
in Temecula, and his legal representation was not immediately known.
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