A Florida man is facing five years behind bars for hacking into the email accounts of 19 women, stealing risqué pictures of them and posting the images to the victims' Facebook pages.
Joseph Bernard Campbell, 24, has agreed to plead guilty on Aug. 5 in a Tampa, Florida court to federal charges of cyberstalking and unauthorized access to a computer, Tampa Bay Online reported.
Campbell orchestrated his criminal scheme by first sending his targets an email saying they had received a greeting card that could only be accessed if the women entered their email addresses and passwords.
As with most phishing scams, there were no greeting cards, and Campbell was able to walk away with exactly what he needed to access the women's email accounts.
From here, Campbell logged in to the victims' email accounts, where, in at least 19 cases, he found nude or semi-nude pictures of the women that they had stored in their accounts. Some of the risqué pics the victims had sent to their boyfriends, who were in the military and stationed overseas, Lt. Bill Sohl of the Belleair police department told Tampa Bay Online.
Campbell admitted to hacking into between 350 and 500 women's email accounts in all, Sohl said, many of whom he knew from a local private high school.
[Facebook Lets Man Access Members' Nude Photos]
Along with changing the women's Facebook profile pictures to the nude images and making them visible to everyone, Campbell went a step further to harass his victims. He would post a link on each tampered Facebook page to websites called "Pinellas County Sluts," "Dumpster Sluts" and an online forum called "Revenge."
Campbell faces carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each charge.
