A California man is facing charges after breaking into thousands of Apple iCloud accounts and collecting 620,000 photos in an attempt to steal and share nude images of women.
The Los Angeles Times reports Hao Kuo Chi, 40, of La Puente, California has plead guilty to four felonies, including conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to a computer. He faces up to five years in prison for each of the four crimes.
The FBI said it found two Gmail addresses attached to the user names Chi went by during his scam, containing more than 500,000 emails and 4,700 iCloud IDs and passwords. A Dropbox account attached to his email contained an estimated 620,000 images and 9,000 videos.
Chi admitted he would seek out potential victims, then impersonate an Apple support employee in an effort to gain access to their information.
Authorities were introduced to Chi after he gained access to an unidentified celebrity’s iCloud account in 2018. After the images ended up getting posted on a pornographic site, investigators tracked down the iCloud login to Chi’s house.
“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,” Anthony Bossone, an FBI agent, told the Los Angeles Times. “The victim had stored the nude photos on an iPhone and backed them up to iCloud.”
Nearly three years after first coming across Chi’s scam, the FBI got a search warrant and raided his back in May 2021. Chi was subsequently arrested, and on Aug. 5 pleaded 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 charge.
