(WHAS11) -- At six, we showed you the Kentucky Attorney General's top secret Cyber Crime Lab, where investigators solve crimes committed by computers.
The cases often involve sex, identity theft and sometimes even blackmail.
WHAS investigative reporter Adam Walser has this story of a cybercrime that started in the hills of eastern Kentucky and ended up being traced all the way to South Korea.
At the University of the Cumberlands--- the conservative, southern-Baptist university in Williamsburg, Ky. -- pre-marital sex among students is frowned upon, to say the least.
But a 17-year-old co-ed believed that the adult messages her boyfriend sent to her e-mail account were private.
She was wrong.
A stranger was watching.
“He was installing key-logger programs, where are stealth programs that run in the background hidden from the user. That will capture every keystroke that you type on a computer,” Tom Bell, Cyber Crime Lab Investigator, said.
That stranger accessed nine students' e-mail accounts.
But he found the webcam videos and photographs he was looking for in that freshman girl's account.
“He found a sexually explicit video that she and her boyfriend had made and they had e-mailed to each other. He got it out of the e-mail, created a new yahoo account, e-mailed her and said "if you don't do what I ask in this e-mail, I'm going to send this video to the faculty and staff and get you and your boyfriend expelled," Bell said.
What he asked for the girl to do was to photograph herself stripping and performing sex acts.
She went to police, who contacted the attorney general's cybercrimes unit.
Bell began the investigation.
“We had actually assumed her online identity so I was actually communicating with him,” Bell said.
The suspect was able to mask his computer's address, making it look like the messages were coming from other places.
The computer's IP address was bounced to other towns in Kentucky all the way to an internet service provider in South Korea.
Investigator Bell continued communications with the blackmailer, while using high tech equipment to pinpoint his exact whereabouts.
The suspect turned out to be 23-year-old Sungkook Kim, a Korean national and former University of the Cumberlands student.
Kim was convicted of identity theft, extortion, computer fraud and child pornography.
He was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Cases like that prove that while the Internet may be one of the greatest tools ever invented, it potentially opens us all up to a whole range of possible crimes.
Which is why the Attorney General's office has incorporated an educational program called "Think before you post" as part of the cybercrimes unit.
So far, it's been presented to about 24,000 students, teachers and parents in Kentucky.
“Parents need to Google their child's name, not let the child have a computer in his or her room behind a locked door, know your child's password, talk to them about their online activity,” Jack Conway, Kentucky Attorney General, said.
And as for all the stuff you might be tempted to post or send...
“Once something's on the internet, it's out there forever, forever and ever. Nobody's ever gonna get it off,” Bill baker, Cyber Crime Lab Investigator, said.
The Cyber Crime Lab is expected to handle an increasing number of crimes in the future, since law enforcement authorities estimate that 80% of all cases involve some type of digital forensic evidence.
So far, the cyber crime lab has processed more than 1,000 hard drives and seized 68,000 child pornography images.
