A Prairie Grove man charged with stealing and selling computer users’ email passwords pleaded guilty to a computer hacking charge in federal court Monday.
Joshua Alan Tabor entered the plea to a one-count criminal complaint before U.S. Magistrate Erin Setser in Fayetteville. He was released pending sentencing, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office.
According to federal court records, Tabor worked with others, including Mark Anthony Townsend, 45, of Cedarville on an online business called needapassword.com that solicited customers who wanted to get into others’ email accounts. The customers would pay by depositing money into a Pay-Pal account to which Tabor, Townsend and others in the business had access.
On receipt of payment, the records stated, the customer would be sent a screenshot of the target email account to prove access to the account.
The government says needapassword.com made more than $356,000 from May 2002 through June 2013. Fees ranged from $50 to $350, an FBI affidavit said.
Townsend entered a plea to a similar charge in federal court in Fort Smith last week.
The FBI affidavit said Townsend did some of the illegal hacking from a computer at the Crawford County Courthouse in Van Buren. Townsend is an assistant firechief at Crawford County Rural Fire Department No. 4.
The cases against Townsend and Tabor were initially filed in federal court in Los Angeles in January and transferred to Arkansas’s western district earlier this month.
Three other cases involving hacking email passwords also were filed in the Los Angeles court at that time, although it could not be determined if they were related to needapassword.com
In one case, John Ross Jesensky of Northridge, Calif., pleaded guilty in February in federal court in Los Angeles to one count of computer hacking. His sentencing is scheduled for April 29, according to the court records.
Court records showed he made $21,675 from November 2011 to April 2013 by having others outside the United States obtain email account passwords that were requested by people who live in China.
In another case, the government accused Arthur Drake of New York of paying more than $1,000 from January 2012 to February 2013 to a person outside the United States to obtain the email passwords of eight people.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 04/22/2014