Ex-State Department Employee Sentenced For Cyberhacking Scheme

The Justice Department reported Monday (March 21) that a former State Department employee was sentenced to 57 months in prison, punishment for an international email phishing, hacking and cyberstalking scheme that ensnared hundreds of victims, both in the United States and abroad.

As noted in a release by the Justice Department, Michael C. Ford was sentenced in the Northern District of Georgia. Ford pled guilty in December of last year to nine counts of cyberstalking, along with another seven counts of computer hacking to extort. He also pled guilty to one count of wire fraud. He admitted that, in the timeframe of Jan. 2013 to May 2015, during a tenure of employment at the U.S. embassy in London, he took on various online aliases to commit the aforementioned crimes, with the addition of “sextortion” campaigns that led to victims providing Ford with personal information and, in some cases, providing him with sexually explicit videos. He typically targeted females, some of them in college.

Using a fictitious identity as a member of an “account deletion team” for what the Justice Department said was “a well-known email service provider,” Ford went phishing across thousands of potential email victims, with the warning that accounts would be deleted if they did not offer up passwords. And then, Ford used the passwords to hack into hundreds of accounts, searching for sexually explicit material and personal information. He used the explicit material to blackmail those victims to send him even more material.

In a statement that accompanied the news of the sentencing, U.S. Attorney John A. Horn of the Northern District of Georgia stated: “This case, unfortunately, shows that cyberstalkers have the ability to torment victims from any corner of the globe. Hopefully, Ford’s victims can be reassured that he will serve a significant sentence for his conduct. Members of the public must be extremely careful about disclosing their logins and passwords to anyone, even when the person on the other end of an email or instant message appears to be legitimate.”