“Hackers Leaked Intimate Photos After My Laptop Was Stolen”

When hackers threatened to release nude photos of a film director stored on her stolen laptop, she turned on the cameras to document her ordeal.

Spanish filmmaker Patricia Franquesa was sitting in a cafe in Madrid when thieves made off with her laptop in 2019.

Three months later, the hackers contacted her, demanding money, threatening to reveal the intimate photos she stored on the device if she didn’t pay.

Franquesa didn’t know for sure—and still doesn’t know—if the person who tried to extort her was the same person who physically stole the laptop.

But in a situation where victims have so little control, she was able to document the entire episode on film from her perspective as it unfolded.

The result is My Sextortion Diary, which has just been screened at the Sheffield Documentary Festival.

“Making a documentary was my way of taking control and power,” Franquesa tells BBC News. “It was my way of protecting myself, not victimizing myself and dissociating, it was like building a bubble.”

The distance afforded by making the film was valuable, she says, and also helped her process what was happening. “It’s still me, of course, but I had to separate. I was talking about ‘Pati,’ but there’s Pati the character and Pati the director.”

She jokes that it’s darkly fitting that such an ordeal “happened to someone who makes documentaries, so it’s the perfect opportunity to turn (the cameras) around.”

Taking, storing and sending nude photos is completely normal for an entire generation that grew up with the Internet.

But it opens up a whole world of risk that those born in previous decades never faced.

“My dad took pictures of my mom in a bathing suit that might have been a little see-through,” smiles Franquesa as she recalls an era that seems tame by comparison. “But since the digital world came to us, it’s our new way of having privacy.”

In her case, the hackers showed how serious they were by leaking images to her friends, family and colleagues, which they found through her social media contacts.

But Franquesa makes some progress as the film goes on. The police write to say they’ve made an arrest after reviewing CCTV footage from the cafe – which she eventually gets her hands on and includes in the film.

It shows how the laptop was taken by three men, their faces blurred for the film, working together from different positions in the cafe.

But regardless of the progress of the police investigation, the hackers continue to try to extort her.

Exhausted, out of options and refusing to pay, Franquesa finally decides to upload the images to her own social network – a horrible last resort, but one that took away the power of the hackers.

“It was hard, I was crying,” she recalls. “It seemed like the last moment of a marathon. I didn’t want to post the pictures, I was hoping and waiting for this person to stop, and you see he doesn’t, so I had nothing else to do.”

Getting the hacker to stop wasn’t her only motivation, though. “It was for me to say, ‘hey contacts, this hacker has these images, he’s using my contacts, help me out.’

This shifted the balance of power somewhat and meant that Franquesa was able to enlist her friends and followers to help her piece together a picture of the hacker and their behavior.

“Which changes the formula,” she says. “I wanted my contacts to tell me when they got the pictures because then I would have more evidence to take to the police and keep the investigation open.

“It broke the shame,” she reflects. “The other person’s attempt to shame me is interrupted because I own my own photos. And then it magically stopped.”

The fact that the hacker ended contact shortly after Franquesa uploaded the images suggests there was someone already following her when she switched her accounts to private after the first blackmail attempt – but she still doesn’t know who.

The documentary went down well at the festivals it has already played. Mark Adams of Business Doc Europe described it as “a powerful and provocative real-life story, foreboding in its reflection of the unfortunate reality faced by those people who are forced to deal with the appalling behavior of unscrupulous hackers.”

The man who physically stole the laptop was eventually jailed. But for Franquesa, the main concern was less about the laptop itself and more about how her own data was later used against her.

“He was sentenced to 10 months in prison, just for stealing the computer. And I managed, in the judge’s sentence, to say that it is related to possible blackmail,” she explains.

Since then, Franquesa’s focus has shifted to raising awareness of what happened – and asking questions about how these criminal networks operate.

“I told the police, the guy (who stole the laptop) knows what he did with the computer. And the police told me that the computer wouldn’t be recovered and I said, “I know that, but what are they doing with stolen devices?

“Because now there is a lot of mafia. In Spain, you steal devices and sell them, and then they go to people who hack the devices and take the data, find things and start blackmailing. I want to understand what that system is. .”

She points out: “It’s not just about justice in my case, because it’s kind of over for me, but it’s about the police understanding what happens in cases like this. What is the system of these mafias? If I were a cop, I’d be super curious.”

The biggest challenge was how to make something cinematic out of so little material. Franquesa could only document her own side of the story, and most of the developments happen through written communication – emails from hackers, letters from the police, or instant messages between Franquesa and her friends.

But the director “didn’t see it as a limitation” as the film was intended to be a “digital diary”.

Hackers are represented by a digitally altered female voice, while text conversations are seen as digital speech bubbles that mimic WhatsApp threads.

But it’s “and this form of storytelling that doesn’t allow the film to overstay its welcome, which comes at a tight hour.” noted Blake Williams of HyperReal Film Club.

“My Sextortion Diary is always engaging and finds a way to keep the narrative moving despite its unconventional approach.”

The documentary ends before the sentencing because, Franquesa laughs, “We had to close the film in time for South by Southwest!”. – the festival where the film played in March. She says new text will now be added at the end of the sentence.

Franquesa ultimately hopes the film will help change that, as she feels the laws aren’t changing fast enough to keep up with criminal behavior.

“I want to scream that this is not working, our data laws. Our system that is supposed to protect us is moving so slowly,” she says. “There is a problem here with the protections we have.

“The only satisfaction of this case is that we are talking about it now, the ending of the film is bittersweet, success for Pati is the making of the film, but for the hacker, justice is incomplete.”

She concludes: “I hope my case is used to understand what (criminals) are doing, I’m putting myself out there so they can look into my case and help other people.”