A Suffolk man has been jailed for several years after hacking the iCloud accounts of several women and sharing their intimate pictures online.
Tony Spencer, 38, of Victoria Hill, Eye, was sentenced at Basildon Crown Court late last week after admitting his guilt in September 2019 to these cases and secretly filming women and children getting changed in a Norfolk leisure center.
He received a 32-month jail term for nine counts of voyeurism, five counts of taking indecent photographs of a child and 12 counts of Computer Misuse Act offences.
Spencer was caught after a woman came to Essex police reporting that her iCloud account had been hacked and explicit photos of herself posted online. That set in motion an investigation which revealed multiple suspects across the region were hacking hundreds of victims in a similar manner.
Several searches of Spencer’s home in 2017 by the Essex Cyber Crime Team revealed computers containing the images belonging to 12 victims and software he used to access the accounts, presumably either to brute force or phish their passwords.
Detective sergeant Ian Collins of the cybercrime unit said the case highlights why computer users should switch on two-factor authentication (2FA) to protect their accounts.
“Spencer went to extreme lengths to obtain images of young women and children without permission for his own and others’ sexual gratification. His secret lifestyle went hidden for many years until we received just a single report that revealed much, much more,” he explained.
“He used his specialist knowledge to hack his unsuspecting victims’ accounts and then accessed their most intimate photographs for his own sexual purpose and that of others. Spencer was not able to access any accounts secured with 2FA as he would have needed the mobile phone of the victims at the same time.”
Spencer has also been placed on the Sex Offenders’ Register for life and was given a Sexual Harm Prevention Order for 10 years.