There’s something very wrong with a person who could be mean enough to destroy the reputations of people who have not even wronged him. Joseph Bernard Campbell, a 24-year old hacker from Florida, hacked into the email accounts of over 500 women and browsed through their emails, looking for nude or semi-nude pictures. He then posted the pictures on the women’s respective Facebook accounts as profile pictures, effectively destroying their reputation. Most of these women were people he knew from high school. Was it some kind of vendetta? Was he bullied in high school? Did they ditch him when he asked them out on dates? Not necessarily. What Joseph Bernard Campbell wanted was to “harass the victims and cause them emotional distress”. That simple, that sick, that twisted.

His victims were devastated by what he did. Little did they know that a seemingly innocent greeting card had allowed a hacker to gain access to their emails. The women soon received several calls from their friends asking them about their profile photos and whether they knew about it in the first place. In an interview with the St. Petersburg Times, one victim said, “It wasn’t rape or murder, but it was certainly rape of emotions for the women involved.”

The hacker also posted their pictures on several websites, one called “Pinellas County Sluts”, “Dumpster Sluts”, and “Revenge”. The third site certainly leads one to think that the hacker may have held a personal grudge against some of the women. After all, they pretty much ran in the same social circles back in high school.

Campbell will plead guilty to cyberstalking and unauthorized access to a computer. The maximum penalty that he may be levied is five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000. But then, it’s also pretty likely that the sentence will be much less harsher than that. It’s a bit disheartening to know this, considering how the damage he did to the reputation of these women would be pretty hard to top.

Some of these women had nude pictures because they sent them to their hubbies in the military and were taken several years ago. Still, this incident only shows that the net is no place to store incriminating photos. This isn’t the first incident of this type, and there’s bound to be many more. In fact, just last January, another hacker did the same thing, only instead of posting the photos on Facebook, he sent them to everyone on the girls’ contacts list.