Entertainment
Miss Teen USA Extortion Suspect Arrested: Cassidy Wolf Sextortion Case
The FBI has nabbed the infamous person responsible for the “sextortion” of Miss Teen USA Casey Wolfe and other victims which may bring the total to as many as 150 people. The master hacker & cyber perv is nineteen-year-old Jared James Abrahams from Temecula, California.
Abrahams has now been formally charged and released into the custody of his parents on a $50,000 bond. However, young Abrahams will likely find the house arrest he’s in torturous. The only computer he is allowed to use is a desktop PC with special monitoring software which he can use to conduct his college studies.
Abrahams devoted his time to learning how to use malware, hack Facebook accounts, and seize control of webcams other electronic devices. While he took great pains to mask his identity from his victims, it was his inquiries at hacker forums which allowed the FBI to begin piecing together the trail which led to his arrest. Eventually, the FBI was able to intercept his e-mails, and trace IP-addresses back to him. Busted!
Abrahams would reach out to victims showing them naked photographs and threatening to upload them into cyberspace if they did not send him more explicit photographs. If they complied, he promised to permanently erase the images. Sadly, there were victims which believed him and further complied.
In an August interview with Today, Wolf said: “I was terrified. I started screaming, bawling my eyes out. I was on the phone with my mom, and I felt helpless because I wasn’t sure what to do, so it was a very terrifying moment. You would never think somebody would be watching you in your room and this guy had been,’ Wolf said. ‘The thought of that just gave me nightmares.”
With evolution of technology, ‘sextortion’ is becoming more common. In December, Christopher Chaney was sentenced to prison after pleading guilty to hacking into celebrity computers and obtaining nude photos and personal information for people like Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis and Christina Aguilera.
While it’s too early to have firm statistics on sextortion, experts on child exploitation tell NBC News, the number of instances is unmistakably on the rise and has coincided with the explosive popularity of social media and the age of a camera on every phone.
“We’re talking about kids with a lot of privacy and a lot of technology,” said Michelle Collins, vice president of the exploited children division of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “And they’re at a sexually curious age.”
On The Web:
Arrest made in Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf ‘sextortion’ case
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/26/justice/miss-teen-usa-sextortion/index.html