A former college track and field coach was sentenced Wednesday to five years behind bars for setting up sham social media and email accounts in an attempt to trick women, including some he coached, into sending him nude or semi-nude photos of themselves.
Steve Waithe, who coached at Northeastern University in Boston, Penn State University, Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Tennessee, and Concordia University Chicago, pleaded guilty last year to 12 counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud and one count of computer fraud, prosecutors said. The 31-year-old Waithe also pleaded guilty to cyberstalking one victim through text messages and direct messages sent via social media, as well as by hacking into her Snapchat account, prosecutors said.
As someone confused as to how you get duped into sending nudes
Prosecutors said starting as early as February 2020, Waithe used the sham social media accounts to contact women, saying he had found compromising photos of them online. He would then offer to help the women get the photos removed, asking them to send additional nude or semi-nude photos that he could purportedly use for “reverse image searches,” prosecutors said.
Waithe further invented at least two female personas — “Katie Janovich” and “Kathryn Svoboda” — to obtain nude and semi-nude photos of women under the purported premise of an “athlete research” or “body development” study, investigators said.
He also joined sites that allowed him to connect with others to distribute the stolen images and trade sets of images with other users.
Also because he offered to take videos of them at track meets and went through their phones to send their nudes to himself.
Don’t let anyone take your phone if you have something on it that you don’t want them getting.