An unemployed 30-year old man in Southern China was this week given a three-year prison sentence, after his obsession with two beautiful female contestants on a popular dating TV show led him to hack into their webcams, and then extort them with the compromising photos that he snapped.It went like this: the TV show – ‘If You Are the One’ – often displays the email and/or QQ number of its contestants, so sneaky Chen Ding-ning used that info to pose as a representative offering promotional work to many women from the show, and attached a certain spyware virus to his emails. Two women (whose identities have not been revealed; my hasty PhotoShop, above, is for reference only) were hapless enough to have installed the spyware – that’s why we really shouldn’t click on tempting emails or attachments, kids – and to have webcams always attached to their machines.
The pursuant, Mr Chen, then remotely controlled the webcams of these two women to snap photos of them when nude. But he was apparently more interested in gaining profit than voyeurism from his hacking: he used a handful of those naked photos to attempt to extort the two women via email, asking for a sum of 30,000 RMB (about US$4,600) to prevent him from posting topless images of them online.
The two TV show contestants, however, turned to the police, rather than paying up. Nearly a year after the event, Mr. Chen has been banged to rights. Note that his three-year sentence seems mainly for extortion, not for his webcam hack antics.
Chinese netizens’ interest in this story has today pushed the convicted man’s name to #3 in Baidu’s search trends.
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