California man pleads guilty to stealing nude photos from iCloud accounts across US

A California man pleaded guilty to conspiracy and computer fraud after he hacked into hundreds of iCloud accounts and stole nude photos and videos of young women, the Justice Department said on Friday.

Hao Kuo Chi, 40, was accused of conspiring with others to hack into the iCloud accounts starting sometime around September 2014, according to a plea agreement with federal prosecutors in Tampa, Florida.

He allegedly shared and traded some of the images and kept some of them for his personal collection.

Some of the people he shared the images with then “released these images into the public sphere,” the plea agreement said.

Chi went by the online pseudonym “icloudripper4you” and marketed himself as someone who could “rip,” or steal, information from iCloud accounts without authorization, according to the plea agreement.

People would send Chi the Apple IDs and passwords of people whose accounts they wanted him to access, and Chi also created fake email accounts to masquerade as Apple customer service representatives, the plea agreement said. Once he got someone’s iCloud login information under the guise that he worked for Apple, he would go into their account and steal their information.

At least 306 people, primarily young women, were affected by the conspiracy, according to court documents. The victims live throughout the country.

Chi and his co-conspirators collected, shared and traded the images and videos with one another, referring to nude ones as “wins.” They were able to hide their activity by using a foreign, end-to-end encrypted email service to communicate with one another, the plea agreement said.

Chi’s Dropbox account had around 620,000 stolen photos and 9,000 stolen videos that were sorted by whether the content counted as a “win,” The Los Angeles Times reported.

Investigators seemingly became aware of Chi’s activity in March 2018, when a California business that specializes in removing photos of celebrities from the internet told an unnamed public figure in Tampa that their photos had been leaked onto pornographic websites. The FBI discovered that Chi had logged into the victim’s iCloud account from his house in La Puente, California. Authorities searched Chi’s home on May 19, The Los Angeles Times reported.

In May, Chi admitted to hacking at least 200 iCloud accounts at the request of others. Forensic analysis of Chi’s physical and cloud storage revealed that he had also been collecting stolen content himself, and that he had “hundreds of thousands” of stolen photos and videos, the plea agreement said.

Chi pleaded guilty to four felonies, including one count of conspiracy and three counts of gaining unauthorized access to a protected computer.

He faces up to five years in prison for each of the four felonies, The Los Angeles Times reported.

Chi told The Los Angeles Times that he doesn’t “even know who was involved” in the conspiracy and said he was concerned that the news of his charges would “ruin (his) whole life.”

“I’m remorseful for what I did, but I have a family,” Chi told The Los Angeles Times.

This story was originally published October 18, 2021 at 6:20 PM with the headline "California man pleads guilty to stealing nude photos from iCloud accounts across US."