LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Two Silicon Valley men were sentenced today in Los Angeles to federal prison for their roles in a scheme that used nude photos and other private information stolen from email accounts in a bid to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from professional players on the World Poker Tour.
Tyler Schrier, 23, of Menlo Park was sentenced to 42 months behind bars by U.S. District Judge S. James Otero, who in January took the defendant’s guilty plea to conspiracy, extortion and unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information.
In addition to the sextortion plot, Schrier admitted that he had previously extorted and received more than $26,000 from professional poker players in another scheme, prosecutors said.
He further admitted that while free on bond after being charged in the “sextortion” case, he illegally accessed two email accounts that allowed him to steal about $4,000 from online poker accounts, according to federal prosecutors.
The second man sentenced today — Keith James Hudson, 39, of San Jose — received a two-year prison term from Otero after pleading guilty in January to unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information for purposes of private financial gain, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Prosecutors said Hudson admitted that he hacked into a poker player’s email account, stole naked photographs from the illegally accessed account, and plotted with Schrier to extort poker players with the naked images.
According to court documents, the sextortion scheme took place in the fall of 2010, after members of the conspiracy illegally accessed an email account belonging to pro poker player Joe Sebok.
Armed with intimate email messages and photos of the victim, Schrier threatened to post the pictures and messages on the Internet unless Sebok and other victims paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in extortion payments, federal prosecutors said. Sebok and other victims did not make any payments.
As part of the scheme, Schrier sent an email message with a nude photograph of Sebok to about 100 people in November 2010, officials said.
During the sentencing hearing, Sebok told the court that the victims of the plot had “their lives altered and shattered in irreparable ways.”
After the defendants hacked into his email account and released some information to the public, the fallout “instantly damaged my ability to sustain my livelihood doing what I had been since 2005,” Sebok told Otero.
“In short, I was no longer able to maintain my then-current level of participation in the poker industry, representing the brands that I had been previously, as well as greatly destroying my ability to do so with new companies moving forward,” he told the court. “Without belaboring the point too much, it was a nightmare, and one that I was forced to live through with millions of people watching.”
A third defendant in the case, 22-year-old Ryder Finney, of Philadelphia, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and will be sentenced later this year in federal court in Philadelphia. Finney faces up to five years in prison.
