SANTA ANA, Calif. (KABC) -- A hacker was able to get inside women's computers, turn on their webcam and record their most private moments.
His name is Luis Mijangos. A 32-year-old former gang member from Santa Ana who turned to computers after a shooting left him paralyzed.
"The minute you turn on your computer, he's watching you,' said Glenda, one of Mijangos' victims."I felt so violated. I got sick."
"You're paranoid. You live the rest of your life just paranoid," said another victim, Samantha. "He started blackmailing me. He would say, 'Don't piss me off, you (expletive).'"
Mijangos went to federal prison two weeks ago for six years for hacking into more than 100 computers. His victims were young women and teenage girls. Dozens of them were minors.
Federal authorities call Mijangos a "Sextortionist."
"I didn't even know that word existed," Mijangos told Eyewitness News in an exclusive interview. "Another made up word from the federal government."
Mijangos convinced Samantha to send him nude photos. She was 17 and he pretended to be her ex-boyfriend.
"It was like 'Hey, this is my new email,' and from there she fall for it," Mijangos said.
Samantha sent him the photos, but she soon realized she had been tricked.
"He blackmailed me with my pictures in an email saying if I didn't give him more pictures, he'd put them up on my Facebook and MySpace (profiles)," Samantha said. "The worst part was not knowing who it was."
Samantha was merely one of many.
"For many of these victims, the impact was devastating," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephanie Christensen, who prosecuted the Mijangos case."Several victims reported irregular behavior with their webcameras. They noticed their cameras were turning off and on."
Mijangos used popular songs on the Internet to sneak viruses into his victim's computers. He said that once they were infected, he had full access to their computers.
"In one instance, a minor victim was having Web sex with her boyfriend. It's happening over the internet," Christensen said."Her boyfriend on one end of Web camera and she is on the other. And (MIjangos) is watching this very intimate activity and he is clicking and he's recording images, over 3,000 of this young girl in this sexually-explicit conduct."
But the so-called sextortionist said he wasn't motivated by sex. MORE>
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