WOODHAM, U.K.—A British student has been sentenced to two years in jail for attempting to blackmail classmates with Facebook photos doctored to look like pornography.
The cheeky chap—Jake Breakwell, 21, from Woodham, Surrey—downloaded photos of his female classmates from their Facebook profiles, superimposed them onto porn-star bodies and then emailed them back to the unsuspecting victims, threatening to post the doctored pics online if they didn’t send him genuine naughty photos of themselves.
According to the Daily Mail, “One young girl found a MySpace profile set up in her name and, when she opened the page, discovered that her face had been added to the naked body of another, far larger, woman. Suggestive sexual comments had also been left on the page.
“Another victim,” the paper reports, “a university student, said Breakwell … had ruined her first year of college after he posted doctored photos of her on the internet, leaving her worried about how many other students had seen them and thought them real.
“And a third victim,” it continues, “who received emails from his pseudonym with her face superimposed onto 'seriously pornographic' images, felt betrayed by the offences, the judge said.”
“These were particularly unpleasant offences, carried out with a good deal of planning over a significant period of time,” the judge commented, after denying an appeal of the sentence. “His unsavory communications led to young women feeling humiliated, frightened and leaving them with a sense of violation.”
Breakwell may have been caught and punished, but he wasn’t successful in his scheming; none of his intended victims, all of whom he knew from school, complied with his demands.
