Steve Waithe, a former school monitor and discipline jumps coach with Northeastern College, Penn State College and the College of Tennessee, has been sentenced to 5 years in jail for establishing faux social media and emails in an try and trick his athletes into sending him nude images of themselves.
The 31-year-old was sentenced Wednesday to 5 years behind bars, pleading responsible to 12 counts of wire fraud, one depend of conspiracy to commit laptop fraud and one depend of laptop fraud. He was additionally discovered responsible of cyberstalking one sufferer by way of textual content messages and Instagram, in addition to by hacking into her Snapchat account.
Because of an #FBI Boston investigation, former @Northeastern monitor coach Steve Waithe was sentenced at present to 5 years in jail for sextortion, cyberstalking, and cyber fraud schemes focusing on over 100 girls. https://t.co/CQR27k1v0Z pic.twitter.com/D90QMPSaIq
— FBI Boston (@FBIBoston) March 6, 2024
Waithe reportedly requested for the telephones of his feminine athletes so he might use them to movie the ladies’s kind in apply and at meets. In line with a press launch from america Legal professional’s Workplace in Massachusetts, Waithe was seen “scrolling by way of” athletes’ telephones on a number of events.
Prosecutors mentioned he additionally made the faux social media accounts utilizing the names of two feminine personas “Katie Janovich” and “Kathryn Svoboda” to contact girls, saying he had discovered compromising images of them on-line. He would then supply to assist the ladies get the images eliminated, asking them to ship further nude or semi-nude images that he might use for “reverse picture searches.”
Prosecutors mentioned Waithe “left behind a devastating path riddled actually with dozens of victims,” and referred to as for him to be jailed for 84 months, together with the 17 months he has already served since his arrest in 2021, together with 36 months of supervised launch. They accused him of getting images from greater than 50 victims and attempting to get them from one other 72. In line with The Boston Globe, a half-dozen of his victims spoke on the sentencing, some utilizing their first names and plenty of showing near tears.
Waithe was a former NCAA All-American triple-jumper at Penn State, the place he went on to win a number of Massive Ten convention titles and a silver medal on the 2014 North American, Central American and Caribbean Championships (NACAC) in Kamloops, B.C.
After serving his sentence, Waithe will likely be banned from teaching on the collegiate degree and will likely be listed on the banned coaches record by the U.S. Heart for Secure Sport.
