Sorry, that’s not the long-awaited Bloomberg-Cuomo-Kelly sex tape. But if we were living in China, we’d be very trendy. Photoshopping government officials into pornographic scenarios is all the rage and it’s making government officials upset.
This renegade blackmail phenomenon has apparently spun so out of control that authorities in China’s Hunan Province have put up this massive billboard, pleading with the public to quit photoshopping the government and financial elite into porn. The sign reads: “Decisively crack down on the crime of exploiting Photoshop technology to blackmail people with compound pictures, in order to establish a good image of Shuangfeng.”
Last year, 127 cases of photoshopped porn blackmail were reported in Hunan’s Shuangfeng County alone, resulting in a total extortion of 45.3 million yuan. And they’re not alone. In attempt to ward off blackmailers, the local Land and Resources Bureau of Xing’an County in Guangxi province literally blurred out photos of officials on their website. Being that Chinese government officials have a reputation for self-serving photoshop trickery themselves, it’s possible that these pranksters didn’t realize what a serious crime they were undertaking. Surely, now that the government has asked nicely, they will only be blackmailed with genuine, unaltered orgy photos from now on.
