Hao Kuo Chi, 40, of La Puente, gained unauthorized access to photos and videos of at least 306 victims across the nation, most of them young women, he acknowledged in his plea agreement with federal prosecutors in Tampa, Fla.
Apple Inc. is racing to contain a controversy after an attempt to combat child pornography sparked fears that customers will lose privacy in a place that’s become sacrosanct: their devices.In court papers, the FBI identified two Gmail addresses that Chi used to lure victims into changing their iCloud sign-on information: “applebackupicloud” and “backupagenticloud.
Chi’s conspirators would request that he hack a certain iCloud account, and he would respond with a Dropbox link, according to a court statement by FBI agent Anthony Bossone, who works on cybercrime cases. Chi’s Dropbox account contained about 620,000 photos and 9,000 videos organized in part on whether the content contained a “win” of nude images, Bossone wrote.A California company that specializes in removing celebrity photos from the internet notified an unnamed public figure in Tampa, Fla., that nude photos of the person had been posted on pornographic websites, according to Bossone. The victim had stored the nude photos on an iPhone and backed them up to iCloud.
Investigators soon discovered that a log-in to the victim’s iCloud account had come from an internet address at Chi’s house in La Puente, Bossone said. The FBI got a search warrant and raided the house May 19. By then, agents had already gathered a clear picture of Chi’s online life from a vast trove of records that they obtained from Dropbox, Google, Apple, Facebook and Charter Communications.
On Aug. 5, Chi agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy and three counts of gaining unauthorized access to a protected computer. He faces up to five years in prison for each of the four crimes.