Student admits sharing naked photos
BY JAMES MONCUR j.moncur@dailyrecord.co.uk A STUDENT has admitted sharing intimate photos of women online that left victims feeling suicidal.
Alastair Ferguson, 19, shared the nude images and films on a storage app after downloading them on to a computer at Dundee and Angus College.
Most of his victims were from the city and many said they felt like taking their lives after the snaps were shared on the site.
Word spread like wildfire around Tayside in March after the first photographs were discovered.
Police received 16 calls from victims who did not know Ferguson but whose images and videos were shared in public. One said she felt “suicidal” after realising intimate pictures had been shared.
Ferguson was caught after police traced a computer at the college as the source of the leak.
Prosecutor Jenna Grattan explained the images were uploaded to the application named mega.nz with an online link attached.
She told Dundee Sheriff Court that one of the files was called “Dundee” and had images of 29 females.
An email address associated with the mega.nz link was found to be used by Ferguson.
Police traced this to a computer at his college and officers searched his home. He told them: “I looked but I didn’t do anything else with them.
“I saw it on Twitter and downloaded all the images to my phone but I didn’t do anything else with them.”
Ferguson pled guilty to causing the women fear and alarm by uploading images and creating an online link for them to be viewed.
Sentence was deferred until next month and Sheriff Derek Reekie said he would decide if Ferguson should be placed on the sex offenders’ register.