Webcam Hacker Gets 18 Months for 'Sextortion'

TEMECULA, Calif.—Webcam hacker Jared Abrahams, a computer science major at Temecula College, was sentenced late last month to 18 months in prison for hacking into the webcams of as many as 150 women's computers, then attempting to extort some of them into posing nude for him or stripping during a Skype session, threatening to post nude webcam photos he'd taken of them on the internet if they refused. Abrahams had sources that stretched from California to Russia for nude photos of teens, including some of Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf, with whom Abrahams had attended high school in Temecula. According to a report on The Daily Beast, "Abrahams told Wolf that her 'dream of being a model will be transformed into a porn star' and posted a naked photo when she didn’t respond to his threats." Even more egregious—and even more illegal—Abrahams successfully "sextorted" two teeange girls, one in Ireland and one in Canada, into performing stripteases for him during Skype sessions, which he recorded, and also, according to the report, "demanded one 14-year-old girl show 'every part of you!' and warned a distraught 17-year-old victim, 'I do NOT have a heart!'" The Daily Beast article suggests that webcam sextortion is rampant in California, citing a 2011 case where Luis Mijangos, 32, was given "six years for remotely accessing teenage girls’ webcams and playing 'psychological games' with them for his own sexual gratification, and  Karen "Gary" Kazaryan was sentenced just last year to five years in prison for hacking and identity theft—and was labeled a "cyberterrorist" by prosecutors. Why Abrahams was given a shorter sentence than the Mijangos and Kazaryan was not revealed.