A State Department employee was arrested and charged this week for allegedly hacking into the online accounts of college-aged women and then blackmailing them with sexually explicit photos.
Michael C. Ford, 35, who had worked at the U.S. Embassy in London since 2009, was arrested Sunday at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta as he was about to fly back to England with his wife and son. He was charged with multiple offenses, including stalking and extortion, according to a criminal complaint.
Ford’s so-called “sextortion” scheme first came to light in April after FBI agents in Kentucky contacted the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) for help investigating a person believed to be using a State Department IP address to hack into an 18-year-old girl’s online accounts, according to an affidavit.
DSS agent Eric Kasik alleged in the affidavit that Ford stole sexually explicit photos of the 18-year-old, then sent threatening emails demanding that she take explicit videos of other women or else he would post the photos online along with her name and address.
“I want you to record videos of sexy girls changing. In gyms, clothing stores, pools . … You do that, and I disappear,” one email cited in the affidavit read.
Ford also allegedly cyber-stalked and blackmailed a 22-year-old who is the daughter of an executive at a large company, according to the affidavit.
The affidavit states the 22-year-old shared her email password with Ford when he sent her an email posing as a Google representative, a “phishing” tactic he used to hack into his victims’ online accounts. Ford then used the password to obtain sexual photos of the woman and, using a different email address, contacted her with demands that she turn over personal information, according to the affidavit.
“Email me back or I send everything I have,” Ford wrote in an email quoted in the affidavit. “The choice is yours . … I’ll give you til tomorrow to think it over. If I don’t hear back from you, I email everything to your parents and friends and post the pictures online.”
DSS also said it obtained copies of documents from Ford’s computer at the U.S. Embassy, which included a spreadsheet listing about 250 email addresses investigators believe he targeted. The affidavit stated that many of the email addresses appeared to belong to women and contained the domain suffix .edu; in addition, agents determined that many of the account holders attended the same sorority at one Indiana college.
“This leads me to believe that Ford may be targeting college-aged women throughout the U.S.,” Kasik said in the affidavit.
A federal magistrate judge set a $50,000 bond for Ford at a hearing Thursday and ordered that he be placed under house arrest without computers or Internet access at his Dunwoody, Georgia home, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters Thursday that Ford no longer works for the agency.
“The individual named in this case was a locally hired administrative support employee who was not a member of the Foreign Service,” Harf said, as quoted by NBC News. “As of May 18th, the individual is no longer working at the embassy.”
Ford’s attorney declined to comment to several news outlets, but told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that his client had married his childhood sweetheart, with whom he has a 15-month-old child.
Read the affidavit below:
