LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD) – A Lubbock man will spend the next few years in prison after admitting to impersonating a woman online and using her image explicitly.
Michael Byerly pleaded guilty to online impersonation this morning. He confessed he used Photoshop to make explicit photos of the victim and then uploaded them to pornography websites.
He also admitted to contacting other people as the victim, sharing the images he made as well as her personal information, including where she worked and her home address.
“It became a very dangerous situation, because then the people that he was talking to found her on Facebook and other normal platforms and reached out to her saying, ‘hey is this you?’ That’s how she even became aware these images were out there,” prosecutor Laura Beth Fossett said.
Fossett said this type of case was an anomaly for prosecutors in Lubbock, but with the growth of artificial intelligence, these types of scenarios are becoming more prevalent.
Byerly was sentenced to five years in prison.
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