Two men have been charged with illegally gaining access to Ring’s home security cameras in a series of swatting schemes to live-stream police response to fake emergencies, federal prosecutors said Monday.
Kya Christian Nelson, 21, of Wisconsin, and Thomas Andrew McCarty, 20, of North Carolina, are charged with one count of conspiracy to intentionally access unauthorized computers. Nelson is also charged with two counts of intentional unauthorized access to a computer and two counts of aggravated identity theft.
Swatting is a form of retaliation in which someone makes a false report to the police in order to send first responders, including SWAT teams, to someone’s address.
FLORIDA SCHOOLS SEE SEVERAL SWATTING CALLS ‘HOES’, FORCING MULTIPLE CLOSURES
The US Department of Justice charged two people with “bashing” houses over the course of a week in November 2020.
(Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Nelson is jailed in Kentucky in an unrelated case, the Justice Department said. McCarty was arrested last week in Arizona.
The couple allegedly gained access to home security cameras across the country from November 7 to 13, 2020. They gained access to the Ring devices by hacking Yahoo! email accounts belonging to the victims, authorities said.
“Smashing is a serious crime, and those responsible must be brought to justice,” a statement from Ring to Fox News Digital said. “In this case, we learned that bad actors used stolen customer email credentials obtained from third-party (non-Ring) services to access other accounts, and we took immediate action to help those customers protect their accounts.” of Ring”.
The company said it also supported the FBI’s efforts to catch those responsible.
“We take our customers’ security very seriously, which is why we’ve made two-step verification mandatory, run regular scans of Ring passwords compromised in non-Ring breaches, and continually invest in new security protections to strengthen our systems,” he said. “We are committed to continuing to protect our customers and vigorously pursuing those who seek to harm them.”
After a long-standing access to Ring’s cameras, Nelson and McCarty allegedly made false emergency reports to local law enforcement agencies where the victims live in an effort to get a police response at their homes. Using the information from the security camera, they then live streamed the audio and video from the devices on social media during the police response, authorities said.
They also taunted the victims through Ring devices.
On November 8, Nelson and another person made a call to the West Covina, California, police department, allegedly from a victim’s home. They posed as a girl by reporting that her parents were drinking and shooting weapons inside the home, the Justice Department said.
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Nelson threatened and taunted the responding West Covina police officers.
Prosecutors said similar incidents occurred in Flat Rock, Michigan; Redding, Calif.; Billings, Montana; Decatur, Ga.; Chesapeake, Virginia; Rosenberg, Texas; Oxnard, Calif.; Darien, Ill.; Huntsville, Alabama; North Harbor, Florida; and Katy, Texas.
Nelson faces 12 years in prison. McCarty faces five years.
