The Webcam Sex Crimes

by Tim McGirk Info

Tim McGirk has covered Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a bureau chief for Time magazine. He is now writing out of California.

X Close

• - +
• Single Page
• print

Getty Images A wheelchair-bound voyeur is charged with hacking women’s computers, stealing their sexually explicit photos—and then blackmailing them into making him personal porn videos. Tim McGirk reports.

A divorced mother of three in Seattle, K.S. opened her email one day and found a message from a stranger. “Read This and Be Smart,” it said. When K.S. opened the email she found, to her horror, a sexually explicit photo—of herself.

The accompanying note was nothing less than blackmail: “This is what I want: a porn video of you… if I don’t get that video in a day I will publish these images and let your family know about your dark side as a hooker so you better do that video and send it to me via email and you will never hear from me ever.”

Mijangos would demand that the woman send him new photos or videos of herself masturbating, according to the FBI. Out of fear, they sometimes obliged.

K.S. didn’t know the mysterious blackmailer, yosoylammer@hotmail.com. But she knew that photograph. Her boyfriend had taken some pictures of her during a bout of raunchy fun and emailed them to her afterward. But she had never bothered to open the attachment, and the pictures, unbeknownst to her, had been sitting in her inbox for ages. Through the Internet, this stranger had managed to seize control of K.S.’s computer and pluck them out. He’d also rifled through her emails to learn other unsavory bits of information that could be used against her—he knew, for instance, about her three kids and that she had “a psycho ex (husband).” And when K.S. tried to exorcise him from her computer, he fired back: “I’m not playing you have six hours and don’t be stupid changing your emails or Myspace passwords won’t change a thing… if I don’t hear from you then your family will hear from me.”

Only the FBI and the Glendale, California, police know whether K.S. gave in to the blackmailer’s sexual extortion. But plenty of other women and girls did, terrified that this voyeur would carry out his threats to circulate compromising photos and videos to their classmates, parents, husbands, bosses—everyone listed in their online address books.

The FBI found K.S.’s email and those of 229 other female victims—including 44 minors—on March 10 when they raided a blue house in the tidy suburban neighborhood of Santa Ana, California. They arrested Luis Mijangos, 31, a Mexican citizen who said he earned $1,000 a week writing computer programs and designing websites. Paraplegic ever since he was paralyzed at age 18 when he strayed into a gunfight between two rival gangs, Mijangos was charged last week with extorting women for “sexually compromising photographs.” Laura Eimiller, spokesperson at the FBI’s Los Angeles bureau, says that the investigation is continuing into Mijangos’ possible links with other hackers, and additional charges have not been ruled out.

Among the most unnerving charges are indications that Mijangos even spied on women through their webcams, clandestinely watching and videotaping them in their homes. Using hacker software, he was able to track which keys his victim was tapping on her computer and then send instant messages to her friends with gremlin-like codes that would allow him access to their computers, too. One victim, known as N.W., noticed that her webcam kept turning on, seemingly by itself. She became nervous that the computer, which was in her bedroom, had been hacked, and that someone was watching her, she told the FBI. She was probably right. Police found a log of her instant messages in Mijangos’ home. According to the FBI, Mijangos possessed dozens of webcam videos of women “undressing, getting out of the shower, having sex.” Many of them, according to court documents, “appear to be juveniles.”

Most of us conduct ourselves online as if our computers are built like Fort Knox. But according to John Naughton, a British writer on technology and professor at the U.K.’s Open University, “The Internet is the nearest thing to a perfect surveillance machine the world has ever seen.” It teems with hackers siphoning off credit-card numbers, bank passwords, and personal details for a multiplicity of money-making scams. Pedophiles troll for children and, as the so-called Craigslist killings show, even alleged murderers have turned to the Web to conduct their business.

But in the pantheon of hackerdom sleaze, Mijangos, if guilty, may be something of a rarity: a hacker whose primary motive was sexual exploitation. It is the first case of its kind in California, and perhaps anywhere in the United States, according to authorities. The FBI’s affidavit paints a picture of Mijangos as a wheelchair-bound voyeur who roamed online chat rooms stalking his victims. After the FBI raid, in which investigators confiscated his computer and a trove of videos, many of them of teenage girls, Mijangos admitted that he had hacked into women’s computers, but claimed he had only done so at the request of the women’s boyfriends or husbands. Most of his victims lived in Long Beach, not far from Santa Ana, but investigators say he preyed on women as far away as New Zealand.