LOS ANGELES — A Florida man was charged with hacking into the e-mails of Christina Aguilera, Scarlett Johansson and Mila Kunis in a computer-invasion scheme that targeted Hollywood celebrities, federal authorities said Wednesday.
Christopher Chaney, 35, of Jacksonville, Fla., was arrested without incident as part of a year- long investigation of celebrity hacking that was dubbed “Operation Hackerazzi.”
Chaney was charged with 26 counts of identity theft, unauthorized access to a protected computer and wiretapping.
If convicted, he faces up to 121 years in prison. It wasn’t immediately known whether he had retained an attorney.
Authorities said Chaney was responsible for stealing nude photos taken by Johansson herself that were later posted on the Internet.
Chaney offered some material to celebrity blog sites, but there is no evidence that he profited from his scheme, said Steven Martinez, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office.
Chaney hacked Google, Apple and Yahoo e-mail accounts in November through February, then hijacked the forwarding feature so that a copy of every e-mail received was sent, “virtually instantaneously,” to an e-mail account he controlled, according to an indictment handed up Tuesday by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles.
