Two criminals in the United States have been charged with hacking Ring home security cameras and using them for “swatting” the victims. They would hack into Yahoo email accounts of victims and target people specifically with Ring accounts.
Swatting is when someone falsely reports a violent incident to the police at a target address. The police respond in force to scare and embarrass the victim. James Andrew McCarty (Aspertaine) and Kya Christian Nelson (Chumlul) would use the hacked Ring devices to live stream the footage of the police raiding the target homes.
In an unsealed indictment released this week, the two were charged with swatting over a dozen victims in one week during November 2020:
“The defendants then allegedly accessed without authorization the victims’ Ring devices and transmitted the audio and video from those devices on social media during the police response,” explains a statement from Martin Estrada, the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California. “They also allegedly verbally taunted responding police officers and victims through the Ring devices during several of the incidents.”
Punishment
McCarty would continue swatting Ring camera owners into 2021, including call bomb threats and hostage situations over 20 times. He was arrested last week and has been charged with conspiracy to intentionally access computers without authorization. As for Nelson, he is already incarcerated in Kentucky for an unrelated incident and has also been charged.
If found guilty on all charges, the pair will face a statutory maximum sentence of five years in federal prison on the conspiracy charge. The charge of intentionally accessing a computer without permission also carries a five-year max sentence.
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