Teen allegedly extorts thousands of dollars from teacher he was having sex with

1-26-17 Texas:

DALLAS -- A Texas teacher faces sexual assault charges after evidence of a sexual relationship with student surfaced, WFAA reports.

The 14-year-old boy at the center of the controversy at Quintanilla Middle School in Dallas is suspected of extorting thousands of dollars from the teacher.

Police say 30-year-old Sandy Doan had a sexual relationship with the student.

"He commented that he was smitten with this pretty teacher," said the boy's uncle.

Court documents state Doan talked to police.

"She confirmed that the student received an image of her exposing her breasts and they had engaged in explicit text messages," documents say.

But police say it went further, and the two of them had sex at least three times since July of 2015.

The boy's mother found the messages.

"And lo' and behold, she got her text on her phone stating that my nephew and this teacher were having a relationship," the teen's uncle said.

The boy's mother noticed he suddenly had a lot of money. Police say the teen started extorting money from the teacher.

The arrest affidavit states the teen sent Doan a text message in January of 2016 demanding money: "Aint b'sing watch ima start getting the pics and everything ready to show the cops. Right i aint playing."

"He would need money, and he would just call her and ask for more. She would drop it off for him, and you know, he would pick it up and be gone for 2-3 days at a time," the boy's uncle said.

Police say the teacher paid the teen about $28,000. The family says the boy would use the money for alcohol and drugs. His mother went to the principal.

"She requested that the school tell the teacher to stop providing money to her child as he was using it for illegal purposes and causing issues at home," court documents said.

"He got a free piggy bank an easy piggy bank, and he continued asking for these favors," the uncle said.

Doan was arrested Friday and charged with sexual assault and is on administrative leave. The student most likely won't be charged with a crime for taking the money. ..Source..

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Sexting can be considered child porn, so what penalties should kids face?

2-18-2014 Wisconsin:

Research shows one in five teens are sexting -- the sending of sexually explicit text or email messages.

WISN 12 News investigative reporter Colleen Henry looks into the problem facing parents, police and prosecutors -- what to do with kids caught sharing these explicit messages.

It's a digital world, which can change as quick as the click of a camera.

"I do think it has desensitized us to what we put out there. We share everything else. Why not share a picture of us?" University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee junior Emma Lundsten said.

UW-Milwaukee's sociology of sexuality class is a hotbed of content and conversation historically considered taboo.

"For me, sexting, it's not even taboo any more," freshman Amanda Storck.

The students don't condone it, but said sexting has become a mainstay of social interaction. Girls do it for attention.

"It's very confusing, especially at a younger age when all the girls are getting attention that are doing this," Lundsten said.

For guys, it's status.

"With their friends, at least, they're like, 'Look at me. Look at me, I'm this guy who's getting a lot of pictures,'" freshman Maggie Smith said.

They've all been asked.

But when the kids in the pictures are under age, the law may see those so-called sexy pictures as child pornography, and the kids who take and share them, child pornographers.

Sexting kids have made headlines all across the Milwaukee area from Franklin to Waukesha to Brown Deer.

Despite the highly publicized sexting investigations, kids continue to swap skin online.

Greenfield Detective Doug Tweedie investigates sex crimes, including underage sexting.

"Even if your parents have blocked your phone to send or receive pictures, you can still take pictures on your phone and send them?" Henry asked.

"And send them via Kick," Tweedie said.

Kids avoid parental roadblocks with applications like Kick and Snapchat, which require just a wireless signal to share pictures and video.

"You're bypassing the system," Tweedie said.

Ironically, if caught sexting, kids face criminal penalties originally intended to protect them from dangerous adults.

"I don't think anybody necessarily wants to make a 13-year-old a felon," Tweedie said.

Wisconsin has no law that addresses sexting, so police and prosecutors can use child pornography statutes that can create some unintended results.

"The person who took picture could also be charged for possession of child pornography and then they sent it to somebody, they could be charged with possession of child pornography, and if they sent it to anybody, it could just go on and on and on," Tweedie said.

Those consequences have some states are dialing back penalties for teen sexters.

New Jersey lets first-time offenders avoid prosecution if they complete an education program.

New Hampshire won't prosecute an unwitting recipient of a sext if the teen reports it, and South Carolina is now considering limiting penalties to kids who forward sext messages without permission.

"Nobody has ever had an adolescence that is completely without moments of awkwardness, or mistakes," UWM sociology Professor Cary Costello said.

Costello said the law here fails to target the real problem.

"Extortion and stealing somebody else's images and exposing somebody without their consent, those are the inappropriate behaviors," Costello said.

Costello sees teen sexting as a digital age version of spin the bottle or truth or dare.

"They are expected to do that socially, and they can't just sort of magically mature without stumbling around and trying," Costello said.

The UW-Milwaukee students have some advice for anxious parents -- have common-sense conversations with your kids about actions and consequences.

WISN 12 News contacted the state Legislative Reference Bureau and learned that, as of yet, no one has introduced legislation to address teen sexting. Prosecutors have discretion in handling these cases. In many instances, kids may be ticketed, or if charged, those charges will expunged if kids stay out of trouble.

There have been cases where teens have been charged with felonies in cases involving deception or extortion, and offenders can end up being named on the state's sex offender registry. ..Source.. by By Colleen Henry

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How the FBI found Miss Teen USA’s webcam spy

9-28-2013 National:

The sextortionist who snapped nude pictures of Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf through her laptop's webcam has been found and arrested, the FBI revealed yesterday. 19-year old Jared James Abrahams, a California computer science student who went by the online handle "cutefuzzypuppy," had as many as 150 "slave" computers under his control during the height of his webcam spying in 2012.

Watching all of those webcams to see when a young woman changes her clothes takes a serious time commitment, and Abrahams made one; he "was always at his computer," according the FBI complaint against him. Abrahams yesterday turned himself in after the complaint was unsealed, and a federal judge released him on a $50,000 bond.

Anatomy of a RATer

How did Abrahams get his start learning the intricacies of remote administration tools (RATs), the malware used to spy on his victims? Not surprisingly, he was a regular user of hackforums.net, which features a large RAT forum that I profiled earlier this year. As cutefuzzypuppy, Abrahams asked for plenty of help distributing software like DarkComet to victims, since he "suck[ed] at social engineering" and needed to find better ways to spread his spyware.

He also announced his successes. On May 17, 2012, he told the RAT community at hackforums.net, "Recently I infected a person at my school with darkcomet. It was total luck that I got her infected because I suck at social engineering. Anyway, this girl happens to be a model and a really good looking one at that :D. I was hoping I could use her and her facebook account to further spread my darkcomet rat. I want to mass message all her friends on facebook but I have no idea what to message them to get them to download the rat. Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated :)."

The "model" in question appears to have been Wolf, whose machine was infected in mid-2012. Abrahams used DarkComet to snap lots of nude photos of Wolf, whom he watched until March 21, 2013. That day, Wolf received a message from Facebook saying that someone was attempting to change her password. Then came a similar message from Twitter—then messages from Tumblr and Yahoo. Suspicious, she checked her profiles; her Twitter account now displayed a "half nude" photo of Wolf.

Thirty minutes later, she received an e-mail from her attacker. He demanded that Wolf either send him "good quality" nude pictures through Snapchat, that she send a video of herself, or that she "go on skype with me and do what I tell you to do for 5 minutes." If she didn't, the attacker pledged to release his many nude photos widely—and he attached a few just to prove how many he had.

Instead, Wolf went to the FBI, and the Bureau's LA cyber squad swung into action. On March 29, the FBI looked at Wolf's laptop and found evidence of both DarkComet and another RAT known as Blackshades, which confirmed how the attacker had taken his photos. But who was he? The IP addresses behind the attacker's e-mails resolved back only to a VPN provider which purposely kept no logs. But the RATs themselves had connected back to the attacker by accessing no-ip.org, a service which allows users to dynamically map their IP address to a domain name (in this case, to cutefuzzypuppy.zapto.org and schedule2013.no-ip.org), thereby allowing the "slaves" to phone home, even when the attacker was using a dynamic IP address from a home Internet account. No-ip.org did keep records, and the FBI obtained them.

The records showed that the no-ip.org account was in the name of Abrahams' father and the username on the account was "cutefuzzypuppy." A simple Google search showed just how many times cutefuzzypuppy had written about RATs online.

With the Abrahams family in its sights, the FBI went... to Facebook. Facebook revealed the existence of a Jared Abrahams and listed the college he attended, so the FBI staked out Jared at his school, where two agents recognized him from his driver's license photo. They then checked with the school's IT department, which confirmed that Abrahams had accessed the "no logging" VPN from the school's network. Bingo.

As the investigation progressed, however, Wolf still had no assurance that her nude images wouldn't leak all over the Web. On May 27, Wolf had been contacted by her attacker yet again, who continued to threaten her unless she complied with his demands. He promised to post her picture to hacked accounts of her friends on Facebook, and said that nothing she could do would stop him. "Block all the people, delete your account, whatever, just know that I finally decided I have enough facebooks and will upload your picture on all of them," he wrote.

The FBI began to find other victims in Baltimore, Canada, Ireland... the list went on. Some had complied with Abrahams' demands and stripped for him on Skype. "Please remember I'm only 17. Have a heart," wrote an Irish girl. "I'll tell you this right now! I do NOT have a heart!!!" Abrahams responded.

Those who did not comply did have some of their photos released. While an FBI agent was on the phone with one victim on May 29, the victim logged into her Instagram account only to find that "nude photographs had been posted of her."

On June 4, a federal search warrant was executed at the Abrahams' home in Temecula, California, where agents seized Jared's digital devices and found numerous videos of victims and RAT tools. Abrahams voluntarily agreed to talk and admitted that to everything; he also noted that Wolf was the first of his RAT victims that he knew personally from when the two were in high school together.

Abrahams told the FBI that he was "not normally aggressive."

We’re sorry

After the complaint against him was unsealed yesterday and Abrahams had his initial court appearance, his family issued a statement saying that it "wants to apologize for the consequences of [Abrahams'] behavior to the families that were affected.”

As for Wolf, she has made the issue a signature one of her year as Miss Teen USA. She appeared on the Today show yesterday to say that "it makes me feel really good to know I helped [other victims] out as well... I just think it’s sad he chose to do this and kind of put himself in this big dilemma."

Wolf said her webcam light never went on, which is why her suspicions were never aroused. It may well have been true; in his hackforums.net posts, cutefuzzypuppy shows himself to be an avid student on specific webcam models and drivers, posting lists about which camera lights are "bright as f--k" and which produce "no light, no software, [and are] 100% incognito." ..Source.. by Nate Anderson

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The FBI's Alert Regarding "Sextortion": Why Cyber Blackmail, Though Illegal, Is Difficult to Stop and What Computer Users Can Do

12-1-2010 National:

Extortion and blackmail have been around for centuries--but now, they've gone online. Once, a would-be blackmailer or extortionist would have to physically trail and spy on his or her victim, risking being spotted. Now, however, all that is necessary is a computer, and an online identity can hide the perpetrator's true identity.

Today, a blackmail or extortion plan may begin with a hacker's getting into an Internet user's pc and searching for embarrassing nude photos or messages. If a hacker takes control of a computer, he may be able to control the webcam and microphone. Thus, he can peer into the computer user's bedroom, hear his target's conversations, and know every keystroke she makes online. In addition to being a remote voyeur, the hacker may also become an extortionist -- threatening to reveal embarrassing secrets to a romantic partner or, in the case of a teenager, a parent, unless money is provided or additional intimate photos or videos are shared.

Or, such a scheme may begin with a seemingly innocuous online "friend" request, or a comment by a chat room buddy. Such a request or comment may lead to flirtation, which then results in the victim's transmitting compromising photos to the online "friend." Once those photos have been turned over, the "friend" has leverage to get more compromising photos, and/or to demand money to keep the photos secret.

Such schemes are common enough that they now have a name: Getting sensitive personal and sexual information from an Internet user and using it against that person is referred to as "sextortion."

In this column, I will describe the new phenomenon of sextortion; explain why such conduct is illegal under existing law; and discuss what steps Internet users -- including teens and their parents -- can take to avoid being the victim of a sextortion scheme.

The FBI's Recent Alert, Following on the Heels of a Major Sextortion Scheme

Just this past month, the FBI published an alert for Internet users, asking them to beware of the new threat posed by "sextortion" -- a term first used in a federal affidavit. The alert followed on the heels of a major arrest by the Los Angeles FBI this past summer. The arrestee was a 31-year-old California man, whose name has not been revealed. The man allegedly had engaged in the sextortion of more than 200 victims, many of who were teenage girls; and had invaded more than 100 computers.

The arrestee is alleged to have hacked into victims' computers; installed malicious code; downloaded sexually-compromising photos; and used those photos to extort more photos and videos from his victims.

The FBI said that the arrestee used a popular social-networking site and posed as a friend, relative, or other trusted contact in order to spread a computer virus that enabled him to access the victims' computers. In several instances, he posed online as a person's friend or sister, and sent the victim messages with attachments asking if she wanted to watch a scary video. If victims opened the attachment, the virus self-installed surreptitiously. Unbeknownst to the victim, the hacker then had control over her computer -- including all files, folders, images and devices.

The FBI alleges that, by threatening to share private and risqué information with their parents and email contacts, the man pressured the young women into providing him with additional pictures and videos. According to an FBI news report, in one example, the hacker attached a pornographic picture of his victim to an e-mail, and told her that unless she sent him a sexually-explicit video of herself, he would notify her parents about all the photos he had found on her computer.

The arrestee is alleged to have used a variety of screen names and e-mail addresses, including some suggestive ones such as Playgrl37 and Hotchit13w, in carrying out his scheme. ..For the remainder of this paper.. by ANITA RAMASASTRY

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