NEW
YORK (AP) — A Bahamian man hacked into celebrities' email accounts to
steal unreleased movie and TV scripts and private sex tapes and sought
to peddle some of the scripts, boasting to an undercover agent that he
had dossiers on at least 130 accounts of stars and bigshots in
entertainment, sports and media, federal prosecutors said.
Alonzo
Knowles was being held without bail after a court appearance Tuesday on
criminal copyright infringement and identity theft charges as
prosecutors described a scheme that also involved proffering an actor's
passport, Social Security numbers for three professional athletes,
unreleased tracks from a singer-songwriter's upcoming album and an
explicit video grabbed from a radio host's email account.
Though
none of the victims were identified, prosecutor Kristy Greenberg told a
judge that several agents had spoken to were "quite traumatized" by the
theft of their personal information.
"This
case has all of the elements of the kind of blockbuster script the
defendant, Alonzo Knowles, is alleged to have stolen," Manhattan U.S.
Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement. "Unfortunately, these
circumstances are all too real."
The
case comes at a time when security is a sensitive subject in Hollywood.
Hackers calling themselves Guardians of Peace broke into Sony Pictures
Entertainment computers last year and released thousands of emails,
documents, Social Security numbers and other personal information in an
attempt to derail the release of the North Korean-focused comedy "The
Interview."
The
U.S. government blamed North Korea for the attack. Subsequently, former
Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal left her position after the hack
revealed embarrassing emails that included racially insensitive remarks
about President Barack Obama's purported taste in movies, and Sony
Pictures agreed to pay current and former employees up to $8 million to
reimburse them for identity-theft losses and other costs.
Also
last year, hackers broke into female celebrities' personal Apple
accounts, stole nude photos and posted them on the web. Jennifer
Lawrence and Mary Elizabeth Winstead have said they were victims of the
hack attack.
The
investigation into the 23-year-old Knowles began only this month, after
"a popular radio host" received an unsolicited offer from someone
selling scripts for the next season of a popular TV drama, according to
court papers. The radio host contacted the show's executive producer,
who called Department of Homeland Security investigators.
Authorities
followed that offer to Knowles, of Freeport, Bahamas, who called
himself "Jeff Moxey" and claimed to have "exclusive content" worth
hundreds of thousands of dollars, Homeland Security Special Agent
Michael McDonald said in a complaint.
Within
days, Knowles — via video call — was showing an undercover agent
scripts for an unreleased comedy movie, a new TV show, and other
materials, some marked as having been distributed to actors, the
complaint said. Knowles said he'd gotten into celebrities' accounts by
sending either a computer virus or a false warning that the person's
account had been hacked, and then using the information he got back to
change the accounts' email settings so he could maintain ongoing access,
it said.
"The
possibilities are definitely unlimited," Knowles told the undercover
agent in a recorded conversation, according to the complaint.
On
Dec. 12, Knowles sent the undercover agent a sexually explicit image
and a video from the email account of a second radio host that the host
had received from another victim described as a "television host and
columnist," the complaint said. It says he claimed, "This is just an
example of things I can get."
At
a meeting in New York on Monday, the day he was arrested, he offered to
sell the undercover agent about 15 TV and movie scripts for $80,000, it
said.
___
This
story makes the correction that an explicit video was obtained from a
radio host's email account; it was not video of the radio host.
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