Indictment Returned Against Atlanta Man Accused of "Sextortion"

An Atlanta man and former State Department employee has been indicted by a federal grand jury on cyberstalking and other charges after prosecutors said he used compromising photos of college-aged girls to blackmail them into providing him with more sexual material, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced Wednesday.

Michael C. Ford allegedly used a computer at the U.S. Embassy in London to operate his scheme from January 2013 to May of this year. According to prosecutors, Ford obtained passwords for his victims’ social media and e-mail accounts by pretending to be a member of Google’s “account deletion team” and threatening to delete the victims’ accounts unless he received a password.

Password in hand, Ford would then allegedly access his victims’ social media accounts and find sexual images of his victims and threaten to send them to friends and family if the victims did not provide him with videos of “sexy girls” undressing in changing rooms, locker rooms, and other areas.

Ford allegedly followed through on the threats if his victims refused to cooperate; prosecutors say he did sent some sexually compromising photos of uncooperative victims to their families and friends, and even threatened victims by saying he knew where they lived.

Special Agent Eric J. Kasik with the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service wrote in an 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.”

Ford was arrested at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in May and now faces nine counts of cyberstalking, seven counts of computer hacking to extort, and one count of wire fraud. He is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Read Kasic’s affidavit in full below: