Computer repair guy arrested for voyeurism

A computer repair guy, Trevor Harwell, was recently arrested for multiple charges of computer access and fraud. He was found guilty for placing a program on laptops that were sent over to the place he was working on for repair. Called Camcapture, it allowed him to remotely control the webcam of the user’s laptop, to let him capture images while they weren’t looking. To make sure that the girls were naked in front of the camera, he forced the computer to display a fake error message on each machine.

The error message asks users to place their laptops “near hot steam for several minutes” in order to clean “an internal sensor” in the machine. Now you’d be thinking, “Who would fall for such a trap?” Well, according to the report, Harwell managed to score thousands of images from his victims who had brought their laptops with them into the bathroom for a shower. Unfortunately for him, his grand scheme came to an end when the mother of a young girl became suspicious of the message that kept popping up.

Needless to say, the police was contacted and the rest is history. The moral of the story? Be careful where you send your laptops to for repair, and try to be on the lookout for programs like Camcapture. Some programs might not even be kind enough to give you a warning message.

George Wong
Categories: Computers
Tags: Laptops, remote, spy, webcam