Inside the Mind of Luis Mijangos, Sextortion Hacker "Mistah X"
January's GQ has a fascinating piece on a fellow who turned up in our crime coverage the past couple years: Luis Mijangos, the so-called "sextortion" hacker out of Santa Ana sentenced Sept. 1 to six years in prison for cyber-terrorism.
The 32-year-old undocumented immigrant hacked into dozens of computers to obtain personal data--and in some cases demanded sexually explicit videos from females lest he email their boyfriends the lie that the women willingly sent him risque images he actually obtained on the sly.
Mijangos, who has been confined to a wheelchair since getting caught in gang crossfire as a teen, was obsessed with the X-Men character Professor X, so much so that his handle with the people he sextorted was "Mistah X." In "The Hacker is Watching," David Kushner writes that Amy Wright, a 20-year-old brunette at UC Irvine, was on her laptop when she got an IM from mistahxxxrightme asking for webcam sex. When Wright told the stranger off, Mistah X IM'd back that he knew all about her, describing her dorm room, the color of her walls, the pattern on her sheets, the pictures on her walls. "You have a pink vibrator," he wrote before posting a shot of her in that very room, naked on the bed, having webcam sex with her boyfriend James Kelly.
