Court Documents Name The Man Tied To Celebrity Nude Hacking Scandal
It could be certified as the hack that changed the way Hollywood celebrities view Internet. Nearly two years after hackers released hundreds of nude images of Hollywood stars in a major scandal that came to be known as the Fappening, new court documents reveal the name of the FBI’s top suspected hacker: Ed Majerczyk.
Majerczyk, a Chicago man, is accused of phishing his way into sexually explicit photos from celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Justin Verlander, Kirsten Dunst, and others. In total, there were more than 100 victims, according to court documents obtained by Gawker.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the home of Ed Majerczyk in October 2014, alleging that he had been illegally accessing Apple iCloud accounts from his home in Chicago, according to Gawker. That’s same month, federal agents raided Emilio Herrera‘s house on the city’s South Side.
The court documents recount how Lawrence—who called the leak a “sex crime”—lost access to her iCloud account and then received false support emails from the likes of fake emails like [email protected] and fake domains like applesecurity.serveuser.com.
Gawker reports that FBI documents show Majerczyk posed as an Apple technical assistant employee to gain access to the iCloud accounts of very famous actresses, where the nude photos were stolen from and subsequently leaked to the Internet.
“The FBI says Majerczyk, through a series of bogus email accounts like ‘[email protected]’ created a phishing dragnet that duped very famous victims into providing him with their passwords through some pretty elementary tricks…”
Gawker report says that Lawrence forwarded a fake password reset phishing email to her assistant, a move that might have given the hacker full access to her iCloud account. The court documents allege that Majerczyk used the same method to gain access into other Hollywood stars iClouds accounts.
Majerczyk, who lives on Narragansett Avenue in the Clearing neighborhood, breached 330 different iCould accounts a total of 600 times in 2014, Gawker reports.
The overwhelming majority of the iCloud accounts accessed by Majerczk where from outside of Illinois, according to the Sun-Times. The FBI’s investigation began in Los Angeles but continued in Illinois after the hackers were identified.
The leaks which were called as Fappening by users on 4Chan were known as Celebgate and caused much heartburn in the Hollywood community in general. The leak first gained popularity on 4chan before spreading to Reddit and becoming headline news around the world.
