A teenager convicted of uploading intimate photos of women online – leaving many victims suicidal – has been fined £1000.
Sick Alastair Ferguson, 19, shared nude images and films to a public storage app after downloading them to a computer at a college.
The Dundee apprentice’s victims were from the city and many felt like taking their own lives after the snaps were circulated.
Word spread like wildfire on Tayside in March after the first photographs were spotted. Police received numerous complaint calls from victims who didn’t know Ferguson but whose images and videos were shared in public.
Yesterday Ferguson, of Dundee, appeared for sentence at the city’s sheriff court but dodged being put on the sex offenders’ list.
His solicitor insisted his client was “not a voyeur” and would “never grace the courts again”.
Fining Ferguson, Sheriff Derek Reekie told him: “You have clearly learned a very harsh lesson about the dangers of social media.”
It was heard previously how Ferguson was snared after police traced a computer at Dundee and Angus College as the source of the leak.
He told police: “I saw it on Twitter and downloaded all the images to my phone but I didn’t do anything else with them.”
Ferguson pleaded guilty to causing the women fear and alarm by uploading images and creating an online link for them to be viewed.
One victim, 25, said: “I’ll never be the same again.”
