Cops have found 300 new victims of an alleged cyber-sicko charged with going online as a college co-ed to trick female students into sending him their nude pictures.
Chubby Hunter College student Elvin Chaung, 20, of Ditmas Park, is already charged with identity theft, coercion, fraud and grand larceny for allegedly pulling the stunt on two women.
But yesterday, Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Aaron Karczmer succeeded in getting Chaung’s bail hiked – from $2,500 to $35,000 cash – on the stunning new charges.
The new victims surfaced, the prosecutor said, in the ongoing investigation of Chaung’s massive cache of computer files and DVDs by the NYPD computer-crime squad.
The squad has found that Chaung allegedly tried to hook in more young women at 23 different schools, including 100 victims at Hunter College, 20 at Columbia University, eight at Syracuse University, and eight at Boston University.
Chaung allegedly worked by going online at the popular Web site Facebook.com while assuming the identity of a girlfriend of the would-be victim, and pleading for pictures under the guise of needing them for an art project.
The prosecutor did not say how many of these 300 identity thefts and coercion attempts were successful in landing Chaung any actual photos.
“We’ve found scores and scores of pictures” of victims “in various stages of undress,” Karczmer said. Inside victim folders would be tucked information from their Facebook site, copies of chats he’d conducted with them, and the various videos and still photos he had gleaned through deceit and threats, the prosecutor said.
Chaung has claimed to cops that his actions were merely a “prank,” but he persisted even when one victim’s father threatened to find out who he is and report him to the FBI, or when one victim, believing Chaung’s ruse of being a close friend who planned to commit suicide, carried on a worried correspondence.
“There’s no way the defendant thought this was a prank,” the prosecutor said. “It’s very nasty, very actually creepy conduct.”
Some of Chaung’s victims were people he knew; Chaung was also in the habit of walking around Hunter snapping cellphone pictures of women students’ buttocks, Karczmer said.