Grady Sizemore's NSFW Pics Hacked by 19-Year-Old College Student, Say Cops
CLEVELAND, Ohio (CBS/AP) Leah Ayers, a 19-year-old Minnesota woman, has been charged for allegedly hacking into the e-mail account of Cleveland Indian Grady Sizemore's girlfriend to steal some seriously NSFW pictures that hit the Internet last year.
Sizemore's Playboy model girlfriend Brittany Binger said that the pictures could only have come from her e-mail account or from the cellphone that sent them, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Binger contacted the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department who was able to determine that someone had accessed Binger's account at least four times in August 2009. Investigators served search warrants on Yahoo.com and Frontier Communications in order to find out the hacker's IP address, according to the paper.
The IP address led investigators to the home of Ayers' parents, who live in Apple Valley, Minn., about 20 miles outside Minneapolis.
Investigators searched the home in April, but when Apple Valley Police Detective Sean McKnight contacted Ayers for an interview and asked that she bring her personal laptop with her, she claimed her computer was at the St. Cloud State University help desk to have the fan repaired, the Star Tribune reported.
But it turns out the fan was apparently not what Ayers was worried about, it was her hard drive. Investigators say that when they retrieved the laptop from the university help desk they learned that not only had Ayers dropped it off two days later than she claimed, she had also asked them to reformat her hard drive and didn't mention anything about a fan, according to the paper.
A forensic analysis of the hard drive showed that the computer had been used to access Binger's Facebook, MySpace and email accounts. Investigators also found a number of the racy photos of Sizemore.
Ayers was charged Wednesday with two counts of unauthorized computer access, a gross misdemeanor. She is scheduled to appear in court Nov. 29.
When the pictures first surfaced, Sizemore's attorneys immediately filed cease and desist orders against websites that published them. Sizemore issued an apology to fans saying the pictures were never supposed to go further than his girlfriend's computer.