New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal has announced that Patrick S. Farrell, 37, of Millstone Township, was sentenced to prison on April 18 for hacking into the private cloud-based accounts of two women and stealing sexually explicit videos and photos of them, which he posted on publicly accessible sites.
Farrell was sentenced to five years in state prison by state Superior Court Judge Richard W. English, sitting in Freehold.
Grewal said Farrell pleaded guilty on Dec. 7, 2018 to an accusation charging him with second degree computer theft.
Farrell was charged following an investigation by the New Jersey State Police Troop C Criminal Investigations Office, Cyber Crimes Unit, and Digital Technology Investigations Unit, the Division of Criminal Justice, the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office, the New Brunswick Police and the Montclair State University Police.
Grewal said the investigation revealed that between October 2015 and April 2016, Farrell hacked into the cloud-based storage accounts of two women and, in each case, stole a sexually explicit video of the victim as well as one or more nude photos of the victim.
In one case, he posted the stolen video on a video-sharing website and posted four nude photos of the victim on another multimedia sharing website.
In the other case, he posted the sexually explicit video and a nude photo on the victim’s own social media account. The victims did not know Farrell and neither consented to him accessing their accounts.
Prosecutors noted at sentencing that Farrell admitted to investigators that he breached more than 1,000 private email accounts during a four-year period, stealing private photos and other personal information, according to Grewal.
