Any longtime reader of Ars will know that for years now we’ve seen case after case of what’s come to be known as “sextortion.”

It’s a familiar script: boy chats up girl (or sometimes boy) online, hacks her or his e-mail, asks for or steals nude photos, and threatens the victim with the possibility of publicizing those photos, before eventually getting caught. In recent years, we’ve brought you these sordid tales from Mississippi, California, Michigan, and New Hampshire. They’re all quite disturbing.

On Tuesday, yet another man from the Golden State was caught—Karen “Gary” Kazaryan, 27, who was arrested by the FBI. The Glendale man was indicted (PDF) last week on 30 total counts of “Extortion, Threatening Letters, False Personation, Identity Theft, and Contact by Electronic Communication with Intent to Annoy,” as well as “knowingly and without lawful authority [possessing and using the] identification of other persons.”

Specifically the indictment charges him with gaining unauthorized access to e-mail, Skype, and Facebook accounts of over 100 victims in California alone, and 250 more from other states.

A statement released today by the United States Attorney's Office for the Central District of California says Kazaryan faces a “statutory maximum penalty of 105 years in federal prison,” if convicted on all counts.

At least three victims are now "fearful" of the Internet

Special Agent Tanith Rogers of the FBI—who has a long history of dealing with such sextortion cases—wrote the search warrant, which provides many horrifying details of the suspect’s modus operandi.

In one such occasion, as described in the 40-page search warrant from 2011 (PDF)—unsealed for the first time on Tuesday—the suspect logged in fraudulently as user “L.A.” and sent an instant message on Facebook to her friend, “A.M.”

On this November 2010 evening, the faux L.A. asked A.M. to Skype chat with him, but after a while A.M. realized that this L.A. was not her actual friend. A.M. called L.A. by phone, who confirmed that she was not on Skype, and when A.M. confronted the suspect via Skype chat, he told A.M. that he had a topless photo of A.M.’s sister D.M. and another friend, M.O.

The search warrant describes this photo as showing D.M. and M.O. topless in a hot tub, “wearing thong-type underwear that exposed their buttocks.”

The suspect then apparently changed the Skype profile image to show that he actually had the photo and demanded that A.M. and D.M. take off their tops and show him their breasts or he would post the photo on their Facebook walls. He gave them 10 seconds to comply.

When they did not, the suspect logged onto L.A.’s Facebook account, posted the photo, and alerted A.M. that he had done so.

“A.M. and D.M. were scared and felt threatened by the unknown subject,” the warrant continues. “They were crying and both then showed their breasts to the unknown person on Skype. The unknown person said they did not show them for a long enough period of time and demanded that they do it again. The girls complied to his demand and he took the link to the photos off of their Facebook pages. The victim then logged immediately off of Skype.”

As a result of their experience, Agent Rogers wrote that L.A., A.M., and M.O. have all shut down their Facebook accounts, changed their e-mail addresses, and “are fearful of using the Internet and computers.”