Two arrested over app that steals private online photos

/ Screen capture from YouTube

U.S. law enforcers have accused two American men of developing and selling a smartphone app that allows users to steal online photos from a certain photo-sharing website, including password-protected private ones that show naked people.

An online media report said Brandon Bourret, 39, from Colorado Springs, and Athanasios Andrianakis, 26, from California, allegedly developed the app called “Photof****t” that works on photobucket.com. It allegedly enables “fusking,” a cybercrime in which photos are stolen from photo-sharing websites.

The two have been arrested for allegedly using and selling the software to infiltrate files uploaded to the website from July 2012 to July 2014.

The U.S. Department of Justice said the pair conspired to commit “computer fraud and abuse, access device fraud, identification document fraud and wire fraud.”

If found guilty, they face up to 10 years in a federal prison and fines up to $250,000.

The report did not reveal how many personal website accounts had been hacked or how many copies of the app were sold.