He claimed he was a lonely person with few friends. So, the Nanyang Technological University student "stole" identities of MSN users, chatted with their friends online and even tried to blackmail one of them.

He superimposed the face of an 18-year-old girl on a naked woman's body and threatened to distribute this edited picture online - unless she sent him pictures of her breasts.

Song Yick Biau pleaded guilty at the Subordinate Court on Monday and will find out on 15 January whether the offences could land him in jail.

His lawyer claimed in mitigation that the entire exercise had started as an "experiment" and went on to give Song "cheap thrills".

In November 2005, he learnt of a programme that would give him access to another person's computer - but only if the other person was gullible enough.

Song would chat with the other person and send them the program. If the other person clicked on it, a fake MSN login screen was created. Once the other person typed in his username and password, an error message would be displayed.

Song would offer to troubleshoot - and end up getting access to their identities. This simple ploy worked, and even Song himself was surprised.

"When he learnt of the programme ... he felt no one would be gullible enough to click on an unknown programme and send the data back to him," his mitigation plea stated.

Instead, someone actually did and Song stole the person's identity, adopted his persona and changed the password so that the person could not access his own MSN account.

Using this ploy more than once, he started chatting with his victims' friends - pretending to be the original user.

He gained access to the accounts of three young women, aged between 18 and 21.

He threatened to post edited "naked" pictures of one of them unless she sent him photos of her breasts.

She reported the matter to the police.

Song pleaded guilty to nine charges under the Computer Misuse Act - each of which carries a fine of up to $50,000 and jail terms not exceeding two to 10 years. He can also be jailed up to two years on a charge of criminal intimidation.

District Judge Liew Thiam Leng has reserved judgment until next Monday.

On Monday, the prosecution pressed for a deterrent sentence.

"We need to tell the general public that no one can do what the accused has done," it argued.

But defence lawyer Mansur Husain said that Song had merely "misread the rules of the Internet". He said the threat to publish nude pictures of the victim was merely a "joke".

Things turned sour for the final-year accountancy undergraduate when a team of officers from the Technology Crime Investigation Branch raided Song's flat on Jan 6 last year and arrested him. - TODAY/st