UPDATE, JUNE 10, 1:11 P.M.: The Orange County District Attorney's office (OCDA) has announced the charges filed against Trevor Timothy Harwell, the 20-year-old computer technician accused of secretly installing spyware on female customers' hard drives to capture images of them naked.
The Fullerton resident has been slapped with 12 felony counts of computer access and fraud
with sentencing enhancement allegations for committing a crime for
sexual gratification.
]
Conviction could bring a prison sentence of six
years and four months. Out of custody on
$50,000 bail, Harwell is scheduled to be arraigned July 21 in Santa Ana.
The
Fullerton Police Department, which conducted the investigation and made
the arrest, previously reported that Harwell worked at Rezitech Inc. of Brea and was
believed to be a former Biola University student. But an OCDA
arraignment statement claims Harwell is still a computer science major
at the private Christian institution in La Mirada. He is accused of
meeting six victims through friends and his church and gaining access to
their computers under the pretense of providing computer technical
services. According to the statement:
Harwell is accused of illegally accessing the six victims' computers to
install “CamCapture” software, which enabled him to record live and
still images from a remote computer. Harwell is accused of setting up
alerts to notify him to begin recording when a victim was using her
computer. He is accused of recording videos and photographs of each of
his victims in various states of undress without their knowledge for his
sexual gratification.
Two of the victims, who were sisters, observed that the computer camera
was irregularly blinking and took it to be repaired. They were advised
that the blinking was due to the installation of CamCapture. The sisters
reported the fraudulently installed spyware to the Fullerton Police
Department, who investigated this case and identified four additional
victims.
The newly-launched Orange County Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory
examined digital evidence gathered by investigators, according to the
OCDA, which adds the probe is ongoing. Anyone with information or who
believes they may have been a victim should contact Supervising
District Attorney Investigator Anthony Sosnowski at 714.347.8814.
ORIGINAL POST, JUNE 9, 11:25 A.M.: Earlier this week, it was Santa Ana police who arrested a City Hall intern for allegedly videotaping men in restrooms with his cell phone. Now, Fullerton police have popped a computer technician for allegedly using spyware on customer laptops and notebooks to capture images of naked women.
Trevor Harwell, 20, a technician who specialized in Macintosh computers for Rezitech Inc., faces 12 felony counts of computer access and fraud. He's been released from custody on $50,000 bond.
The plot Harwell has been accused of started to unravel last summer, when a woman contacted Fullerton police about strange Internet messages her daughter was receiving. One that appeared to be a system alert stated,
“You should fix your internal sensor soon. If unsure what to do, try
putting your laptop near hot steam for several minutes to clean the
sensor.”
Further investigation revealed the computer had been serviced at Rezitech and that several female customers of the shop had also received similar messages. Many complied by taking their laptops with them into their bathrooms while they showered.
What these females did not know was Camcapture spyware had secretly been installed to their computer hard drives, allowing their built-in cameras to be controlled remotely. Police accuse Harwell of having stored images of women naked or undressing on a remote server before downloading them to his own computer.
Harwell serviced computers in Orange and Los Angeles counties, according to Fullerton police, who claim they have identified several female victims from still, video and cellphone images that were in the suspect's possession.
A former student at Biola University in La Mirada, Harwell likely victimized other undergrads there, according to police, who asks anyone who believes they may have been stung to contact Det. Kathryn Hamel at 714.738.5327.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.