Man who took upskirt videos of female friend and hacked into her online accounts jailed

Spurred by his hatred of a female friend after she ceased contact with him, he secretly took numerous upskirt videos of the victim.

The man, then 21, also stole the then 19-year-old woman’s mobile phone and began stalking her over three months, while still pretending to be her friend.

On Monday (26 November), the man, now 25, was jailed for 10 months. He pleaded guilty to one count of unlawful stalking and one count of theft. Another six counts, including possessing obscene films and insulting the modesty of a woman, were taken into consideration for his sentencing.

The man, who does freelance software-related work, will be appealing against his sentence.

He first knew the victim in 2009 and they began exchanging messages. But the victim stopped contacting the man in 2013 due to objections from her then-boyfriend. The two resumed contact a year later and entered the same university.

In early 2015, the man said he developed a “hatred” for the victim due to the period when she ceased contact with him. He began taking upskirt videos of the victim, claiming to want to “understand more about her private life.”

In the same month, the man decided to join the victim’s co-curricular activities club. He later found out that the victim was single and tried to date her but without success.

In March, the man stole the victim’s handphone as he was angry with her over an argument. He messaged the victim through Facebook, lying to her that someone had found her handphone and needed her passcode to verify. The girl gave him the passcode before lying again that it was not her handphone that had been found.

With access to the victim’s phone, the man went through all the victim’s photographs and extracted her chat histories. He also used a software to retrieve the victim’s passwords in her phone, and hacked into her social media and email accounts.

Angered by a message in the phone in which the victim referred to him as “low EQ”, he logged into the victim’s university account and de-registered her from two modules.

He also created a fake Instagram account to assume her identity and posted photos of her with her ex-boyfriend with captions that were sexual in nature.

The victim reported to her school about the module de-registration. The university investigated the case and traced the IP address to the man’s student account. The school confronted the man, who denied the offences.

The man also lied to the victim about an unknown harasser who threatened him with her upskirt images, prompting the girl to file a police report. The man was subsequently called down for a police interview where he spun a tale about the harasser.

The police later raided the man’s residence and seized his Macbook and phone. Forensic examinations revealed 53 upskirt videos of the victim.

In court documents, the victim said that she was “extremely disgusted and traumatised” by the incident.

“The thought of him videotaping me during our interactions do surface from time to time. As he lives nearby, I feel immense fear and anxiety when I go home, especially in the night or when I see someone who has a similar appearance and physique.”

The victim had to review 238 videos found on the man’s laptop to identify her own upskirt videos as part of police investigations.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Nicholas Khoo sought 10 months’ jail, while the man’s lawyer Raphael Louis sought probation for his client.

District Judge Mathew Joseph noted that the man’s case was one of the worst cases of stalking heard before a court in Singapore.

“The sheer persistence and audacity of his actions are quite breathtaking… one would have thought you were exhausted but you persisted,” said the judge.

Noting that the man’s lawyer had said his client had a bright future and possessed leadership qualities, the judge added, “What is sad is that the promise was there, but the reality was different.”

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