CHICAGO — A man who admitted hacking into the online accounts of at least 30 celebrities was sentenced Tuesday to nine months in prison, the Chicago Sun-Times is reporting.
Edward Majerczyk, 29, also must pay $5,700 in restitution to one of his victims; that’s half the cost of the $11,400 the victim, who was not identified, spent on counseling, a prosecutor said.
In return for prosecutors recommending that nine-month sentence, which U.S. District Judge Charles P. Kocoras accepted, Majerczyk, son of two retired Chicago police officers, pleaded guilty in September. The “Celebgate” scandal exposed dozens of nude photos of A-list celebrities nearly two and a half years ago. The list includes actresses Jennifer Lawrence and Kirsten Dunst, and model Kate Upton.
But moments after admitting he hacked into the online accounts of at least 30 celebrities, Majerczyk’s attorney told reporters that the South Side man is “a very private individual.” He had faced as many as five years in prison for accessing a protected computer without authorization — and accessing the Apple iCloud and Gmail accounts of more than 300 people.
Before the charges were filed against him, Majerczyk had worked as a customer service representative for Commonwealth Edison. The Berwyn native now lives with his mother in Chicago.
“Mr. Majerczyk was suffering from depression and looked to pornography websites and Internet chat rooms in an attempt to fill some of the voids and disappointment he was feeling in his life,” Thomas Needham, Majerczyk’s attorney, wrote in a memo filed last week.
The Chicago Sun-Times first reported the FBI had raided Majerczyk’s apartment on Narragansett near Midway Airport in connection with its Celebgate investigation. Majerczyk told Kocoras last year that he used a trick he “had learned from another individual” to access and download sensitive photographs.
The feds say Majerczyk used a “phishing” scheme, sending his victims emails from addresses like “appleprivacysecurity@icloud.com.” The emails appeared to be from the victims’ internet service providers’ security accounts and would direct the victims to a website that collected their usernames and passwords.
Majerczyk admitted to the judge last September that he targeted celebrities.
But Needham has stressed that Majerczyk never used the photos for extortion, and the feds say there is no evidence he leaked them online.
“Mr. Majerczyk’s participation in the offense was limited to the unauthorized access of information on his personal computer, for his personal use and viewing only,” Needham wrote. “There is no evidence that he shared this information with anyone or distributed it to others.”
The feds walked out of Majerczyk’s apartment in October 2014 with several computers, a cellphone, hard drives and thumb drives, court records show. The FBI also raided a home on South Washtenaw in Brighton Park, but no criminal charges appear to have been filed as a result.
Search warrant applications filed in Chicago describe interviews with some of the victimized celebrities but refer to them only by their initials. Victims of the hack included Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kate Upton and boyfriend Justin Verlander. Some of the celebrities reported they’d been briefly locked out of their online accounts before the leak, records show.
Others said they received the so-called “phishing” messages described by federal prosecutors in Majerczyk’s case. Many said the photographs were meant only for their significant others. And one said she sent some of the 54 private leaked photographs to her fiance. But she said she never sent him the others — she only stored them on her phone.
Finally, an FBI agent described one interview with Lawrence, identified only as “J.L.,” that he had to stop because she became “very distraught.”
“J.L. stated she was having an anxiety attack and was visibly shaken,” the agent wrote.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Lawrence called the leak a “sex crime.”
(Source: Sun-Times Media Wire © Chicago Sun-Times 2017. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
from CBS Chicago http://ift.tt/2jurkos
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