Crime

Panty-Loving Thief Arrested After Using Instagram Geotagging to Hunt Co-Ed Undies 

Here’s another reason to turn geotagging off: Police say a burglary suspect arrested in California last week used Instagram and Facebook’s geotagged posts to track his targets and steal their underwear. Arturo Galvan, 44, was arrested on suspicion of six burglaries last Thursday. “He seems to be fixated on college-aged women,” Fullerton Police Department Lt.…

Former Secret Service Agent Gets Nearly Six Years in Prison for Silk Road Theft 

Former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges is going to prison for 71 months, or nearly six years, for stealing over $800,000 in Bitcoin from drug dealers while investigating the Silk Road. Bridges conspired to break bad as part of the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force with an (excellently named) DEA agent, Carl Force. Together, Bridges…

Anonymous Leaked the Passwords and Personal Info from Paris Climate Summit Attendees 

Anonymous published a Pastebin file containing passwords and personal information from Paris climate summit attendees today, in what it describes as retaliation for the arrests of protestors outside of the talks. Anonymous breached the website of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, accessing and dumping the personal information of officials from the US,…

Revenge Porn Kingpin Sentenced to Two Years in Prison 

Hunter Moore, animate STI and founder of revenge porn site Is Anyone Up, was sentenced to two years in prison yesterday. Moore pled guilty to hacking and identity theft earlier this year. Moore solicited nude pictures from pissed-off exes and posted them on the gleefully vindictive Is Anyone Up, along with the identifying information of…

Hollywood Relaxes Anti-Piracy Rules From Draconian to Just Really Strict

The Motion Picture Association of America, representing six major Hollywood studios, publishes anti-piracy guidelines for theaters that show its movies. This year, for a fun change of pace, they’re actually becoming more lenient. The policy is designed to address the problem of pirates taking cameras into theaters, filming the screen, and then torrenting the results—leaking…

Most Complex Cash Register Malware Ever Is Out to Steal Your Money and ID

A new kind of point-of-sale malware, which uses multiple layers of obfuscation and encryption to cover its tracks, has been identified by security researchers—and is being help up as the most complex software of its kind yet to be identified in the wild. Security researchers at iSight have identified the malware which they’ve dubbed ModPOS,…

The Case That Sent an Innocent Woman to the Gallows (And the Test That Would Have Saved Her)

Few people have heard of Eliza Fenning today, but in 1815 she was the most famous wronged woman in England. Executed for a crime on flimsy evidence, she inspired a new age of scientific inquiry—and a character in Frankenstein. When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1816, she included a character based on the defendant in…

Gizmodo Staffers Confess Their Family Secrets for Secret History Week

It’s been an amazing week of secret histories on Gizmodo, and we wanted to finish up by sharing our own secret histories. Apparently, the family histories of Gizmodo staffers are full of criminal acts, shenanigans, and hanky panky. So it’s confession time … Annalee Newitz: My great-grandfather was an arsonist. He came over from Central…

Hoverboards Are Illegal in NYC, Still Should Not Be Called Hoverboards

The 26th Precinct of the NYPD is here to crap on your futurist dreams and promote safe streets. British police issued a similar declaration last month. Nevertheless, some armchair legal research suggests that the code cited by 26th Precincts social media officer does allow these mini-Segways to surf through the city. NYC Administrative code does…

The Promise—and Perils—of Predictive Policing Based on Big Data

Police departments, like everyone else, would like to be more effective while spending less. Given the tremendous attention to big data in recent years, and the value it has provided in fields ranging from astronomy to medicine, it should be no surprise that police departments are using data analysis to inform deployment of scarce resources.…

Man Hires ‘Hacker’ Through Craigslist, Actually Hires Undercover Cop

In case you’re ever in a situation where you think hiring a hacker off Craigslist will improve things, just remember: you’re more likely to get an undercover police officer instead. Lancaster PA native Zachary Landis had $16,000 in outstanding fines to Lancaster County in relation to a string of DUIs and assaults. So, he placed…

The FBI Thinks Ransomware Victims Should ‘Just Pay Up’

As documented in numerous Nicolas Cage movies, the FBI has a fairly strict ‘don’t negotiate with the terrorists’ policy. Unless you’re a company that’s had your files encrypted, in which case you should probably just pay the ransom. Welp. According to Security Ledger, the advice comes from Joseph Bonavolonta, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge…

Bitcoin-Stealing DEA Agent Sentenced to Over Six Years in Jail

Carl Force, a DEA agent who helped bring down online black market The Silk Road whilst also plundering hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin will be spending the next 78 months in prison, a judge decided today. https://gizmodo.com/dea-agent-who-stole-bitcoin-during-silk-road-investigat-1715282980 Force was an undercover DEA agent working on the investigation into Ross Ulbricht and online black…

Your Family DNA Could Be Used Against You by the Law

Five years after privacy advocates warned about the potential risks to privacy posed by massive genetics databases, they are, indeed, causing problems. Two popular geneology websites, Ancestry.com and 23andMe, both maintain such databases on behalf of private citizens. Now there’s at least one case on record of Ancestry’s data being used in a murder case,…

Amazon is Suing 1,000 Fake Five-Star Reviewers

As well as promising the entire world in a FedEx box, Amazon also trades on the quality of its reviews. So it’s actually not surprising that the company is taking 1,114 unknown reviewers to court. https://gizmodo.com/amazon-is-starting-to-sue-sellers-of-fake-five-star-rev-1696953966 It’s not the first time that Amazon has taken legal action against fake reviews: back in April, it sued…

Former Reuters Employee Matthew Keys Found Guilty of Hacking 

Earlier today, a Sacramento jury found former Reuters social media manager Matthew Keys guilty on three counts of computer hacking. The charges related to a 2010 incident, where Keys posted login credentials to the content management of the Tribune Company to an Anonymous chatroom. The Tribune Company owned properties including the LA Times, which was…

There’s a Reliable Therapy for Sex Offenders — But Nobody Wants Them to Get It

In June of 1994, a convicted child molester named Charlie Taylor moved into a small apartment in downtown Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, across the street from a community center. He had no family. He had no parole officer. At the time, sex offenders deemed too dangerous to be let out of prison early were, paradoxically, released…

Today, the FBI released the 2014 edition of its annual report on crime statistics, which found a decrease in violent and property crimes. New this year are federal stats on on offenses related to human trafficking, hate crimes, and computer hacking; it was also announced that future reports will study non-fatal shootings involving cops and…

Minnesota-based We Are All Criminals shares the anonymous stories of people who’ve committed crimes (vandalism, robbery, drugs, etc.) but were never caught, and contrasts them with similar stories of those who were. In doing so, the project “seeks to challenge society’s perception of what it means to be a criminal.” If you’re not able to…

Crooks With Drone Busted Trying to Smuggle Porn and Drugs Into Prison

Unmanned aerial vehicles often get a bum rap for being technological troublemakers, and this story ain’t gonna help: Maryland State Police say they’ve arrested two men who suposedly planned to smuggle contraband into a state prison using a drone. The Baltimore Sun reports that, along with the drone, CDs loaded with porn were confiscated, as…