Former State Department Employee Admits to Cyberstalking, 'Sextortion'

A State Department employee stationed in London from 2013-2015 ran an email phishing scheme from work designed to force victims in many countries to turn over personally identifying information and sexually explicit photos, the Justice Department announced on Wednesday.

Michael Ford, 36, now of Atlanta, pleaded guilty to nine counts of cyberstalking, seven counts of computer hacking to extort and one count of wire fraud, according to a statement from the department’s Criminal Division, the U.S. attorney from northern Georgia, the FBI field office and State’s Diplomatic Security Service.

The indictment handed down by a grand jury in August said that Ford—while on the job in London—used online aliases to target young females, many of them students in sororities with ambition to be models. Posing as a representative of a common Internet service provider’s “account deletion team,” he sent messages warning the women that their accounts would be cancelled if they failed to provide their passwords.

The passwords allowed Ford to hack into their email and social media accounts to search for sexually oriented photos along with home addresses and other personal contact information.

His victims would then be confronted with a demand that they take “sexually explicit videos of ‘sexy girls’ undressing in changing rooms at pools, gyms and clothing stores, and then send the videos to him,” the Justice statement said.

If his targets refused to cooperate, then he used the details such as their home addresses to threaten them further, in some cases actually sending the victims’ own explicit photos to their family and friends.

In all, Ford broke into 450 online accounts for 200 victims and retrieved at least 1,300 of their messages containing graphic photos. He sent threatening and “sextortionate” communications to at least 75 women.

“The majority of Ford’s phishing, hacking and cyberstalking activities,” Justice noted, “were conducted from his computer at the U.S. Embassy,” which cooperated in the investigation. 

“With nothing more than a computer and a few keystrokes, modern predators like Michael Ford can victimize hundreds of people around the world,” said Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell.  “While this criminal prosecution may never return the victims’ sense of security, I hope that today’s guilty plea brings them some peace of mind.”

Ford will be sentenced in February.

(Image via Flickr user U.S. Embassy London)