Sextortion Charges for State Department Employee in Atlanta

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An Atlanta-area resident and employee of the U.S. Department of State is behind bars after investigators say he used compromising photos of teenage girls to blackmail them into providing him with more sexual material.

According to WSB-TV, Michael C. Ford was arrested at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and now faces charges of interstate threats, computer fraud, wire fraud, and cyberstalking. Ford has a home in Alpharetta, but has worked at the U.S. Embassy in London since 2009.

Investigators with the Department of State believe Ford used government computers at the embassy to carry out his “sextortion” scheme. According to the investigators, Ford obtained contact information of young women applying to various colleges, then blackmailed them with their own sexually explicit photos. WSB-TV reports that Ford demanded one of his victims record video of women changing clothes.

The affidavit against Ford, written by Special Agent Eric J. Kasik with the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service, claims that he told the above victim that he would release compromising photographs of her online and include her name and address with them. Furthermore, the affidavit claims that Ford threatened to e-mail the photos to several of the victim’s friends, many of whom were mentioned by name.

Kasik says in the affidavit that Ford has a prior arrest for “peeping Tom” related crimes, and that police in the United Kingdom investigated Ford in 2013 on allegations of e-mail stalking and harassment.

Files found on Ford’s Department of State computer allegedly show that Ford had some 250 e-mail addresses listed on a spreadsheet, with columns for each e-mail addresses Facebook, iCloud, Picasa, Instagram, and Twitter accounts. Investigators also discovered boilerplate e-mails from a fake Google account deletion service which asks for users’ passwords to prevent account deletion, a scam tactic commonly known as “phishing.”

Kasik suspects that Ford sent the account deletion e-mails to his 250 victims, received passwords from the victims, then used the passwords to log into their social media accounts and search for sexually explicit photos in use for his blackmail scheme.

Read the affidavit in full below: