A 19-year-old man pleaded guilty on Tuesday of conducting an extortion campaign which involved hacking into young girls' webcams, including Miss Teen USA, Cassidy Wolf.
Jared James Abrahams, a computer student from Southern California, is charged with four counts of extortion and one count of unauthorized access of a computer.
According to the Riverside Press-Enterprise, his plea agreement would send him to federal prison for 27 to 33 months. In what many media outlets are describing as “sextortion,” from early 2012 to June 2013, Abrahams hacked into his victims' webcams and secretly took nude pictures of the women whose ages ranged from late teens to early 20s, according to court records. Wolf was a high school classmate of Abrahams.
The victims, some of who were minors, were located in Southern California, Maryland, Ireland, Canada, Russia, and Moldova.
Once Abrahams obtained the images, he would message his targets, threatening them with going public with the intimate photos on social media websites if they did not send him additional nude images. Wolf did not agree to his demands, and went public with the threats.
Abrahams was arrested in June after the FBI raided his home.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Alan Eisner, Abrahams' attorney, noted that the young hacker was autistic.
“The fact of the matter is he has autism,” Eisner reportedly said. “We are not looking to blame his conduct on that.”
