The Snappening: Britain's Got Talent winner George Sampson targeted in nude Snapchat photo leak

Naked pictures of the dancer have allegedly appeared online

Ella Alexander
Wednesday 15 October 2014 10:54 BST
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Britain’s Got Talent winner George Sampson has become the first high-profile name to become a victim of the ‘The Snappening’.

Naked pictures of the 21-year-old dancer have allegedly been leaked online via Snapchat. A spokesperson for Sampson could not be reached.

Tens of thousands of Snapchat images of ordinary teenagers have been published viaviralpop.com. The file containing the material downloaded thousands of times before the bogus website was deleted.

Snapsaved.com, a website that allows users to save Snapchat messages, which normally disappear after being viewed, admitted it had been compromised and apologised for the breach.

In a statement, it said its website and database of images from its app, Snapsave, was deleted immediately when the hack was discovered.

“As far as we can tell, the breach has affected 500MB of images, and 0 personal information from the database,” a spokesperson said.

“The majority of our users are Swedish, Norwegian and American.

“I sincerely apologise on the behalf of snapsaved.com we never wished for this to happen.

“We did not wish to cause Snapchat or their users any harm, we only wished to provide a unique service.”

The photo messaging app claims that 50 percent of its users are between the age of 13 and 17, meaning that some of the pictures shared through this latest leak could class as child pornography.

In August, over 100 celebrities became victim of a large-scale nude photo hacking, allegedly enabled via iCloud. Those targeted in the scandal include Jennifer Lawrence, Cara Delevingne, Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, Ariana Grande and Kirsten Dunst.

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