It starts off innocently enough. A probe launched from a laptop in a coffee shop or a spare bedroom. Hackers find a pretty girl or a popular guy goofing around with friends on MySpace or Facebook.
But the hackers don’t just click and watch — they invite themselves into the youths’ online world and make themselves at home. And whether by sophisticated, high-tech tools or just an old-fashioned guess of a password, they seize control of the account.
In doing so, the hackers have committed a felony — an increasingly common one.
“We’re beginning to see more and more instances of people committing intrusions into social networks, PDAs, even cell phones,” said Kathryn Showers, deputy in charge of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office’s High Tech Crimes Division.
“The hackers are getting very sophisticated. They seem to think that the norms we expect for people’s privacy don’t apply to them.
“It’s sort of like electronic voyeurism.”
The attacks present a challenge for law-enforcement agencies normally tasked with targeting gangsters and bank robbers because the crimes cross so many jurisdictions.
The cases have elements of everything from identity theft and fraud to cybercrime and extortion. With so many elements, it’s difficult to even classify the crimes, but Showers is working with local agencies to develop statistics on the frequency and range of offenses.
“It’s a whole other element of crime to think about,” said Sgt. Chris Colelli of the San Fernando Police Department, a former detective specializing in fraud.
“I could put pictures of you doing something compromising on the Internet, then extort money from you. And once the stuff’s out there, it’s almost impossible to get it back.”
Later this month, Jeffrey Robert Weinberg is scheduled to face charges in San Fernando Superior Court of extortion, fraudulent and unauthorized computer access, unauthorized disruption of computer services and identity theft.
The…