A 19-year-old man has appeared in court charged with hacking into the computers of Miss Teen USA and other women to extort nude photos and videos from them.
Jared Abrahams is said to have taken control of up to 150 “slave” machines from his home in California leering at girls through their webcams. He would then take naked pictures of his victims as they got undressed and later use them to blackmail them.
According to court papers when the computer geek admitted what he’d done in June, he said he had 30 to 40 “slave computers”; or other people’s electronic devices he controlled; and had had as many as 150 in total. One of the computers he hacked into was that of Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf.
She received an anonymous email in which the sender claimed to have stolen images from the camera of her home computer. The FBI said Abrahams knew Wolf, a 19-year-old student of Great Oak High School in Temecula, who won the Miss Teen USA crown last month.
She got a Facebook message saying that someone had tried to change her password to the social networking site. The beauty queen then noticed other logons had been changed and her Twitter picture was now a half-nude picture of herself.
A short time later, she received the first of many messages, including pictures of her at two different homes where she had lived. 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 conversation he had, 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.
He is accused of using the pictures he obtained through the slave computers to then blackmail his victims in to giving him more. Abrahams appeared in court on Thursday and was released on an electronic tag after his parents signed a $50,000 (£31,000) bond.
U.S. District Judge Jean Rosenbluth ruled that he could use a single desktop computer at his parents’ home for school only, albeit only after monitoring software is applied.
"This happened to me when I was a normal girl in high school and it can happen to anybody," said Wolf. Crowned in August, Wolf said she’s not sure how to feel about Abrahams’ confession. "It’s weird for me to be able to put a face to the person who did this to me, and to know that it was somebody I went to high school with," she said. "That’s just weird. It’s mixed emotions, honestly."
While she’s "relieved" that Abrahams has been identified, she also feels pity for her former classmate. "I just think it’s sad that he chose to do this and has now kind of put himself in this big dilemma," the 19-year-old said.
"I don’t think he realizes the consequences that he’s done and the people that he hurt," she added, noting that she "never had any interactions" with Abrahams in high school. "He terrorized me and many girls for so long." Abraham’s attorneys have argued that he has mental health issues; his family has issued an apology.
Wolf hopes that by sharing her experience, it will help give other victims the courage to "tell somebody" about similar incidents. "I know some of the girls who were involved in the case didn’t have the opportunity to talk to law enforcement and to get help," she said, "so it makes me feel really good that I was able to help them out, as well as other people who could be going through the same thing."