Convicted sex offender who hacked jumbotron at the Jacksonville Jaguars’ stadium gets 220 years
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A convicted child molester has been sentenced to 220 years in prison for producing child sexual abuse material and hacking the jumbotron at the Jacksonville Jaguars stadium after the team learned he was a registered sex offender and fired him.
A federal judge in Jacksonville sentenced Samuel Arthur Thompson, 53, of St. Augustine, on Monday, according to court records. He was convicted in November of producing, receiving and possessing sexual images of children, producing such images while required to register as a sex offender, violating the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, sending unauthorized harmful commands to a secure computer and possession of a firearm as a misdemeanor. a convicted criminal.
Thompson was arrested in early 2020 after being returned to the US by the Philippines, officials said. He had fled to the Southeast Asian country about six months earlier after the FBI served a search warrant on his home and seized several of his computers, according to a criminal complaint.
Thompson was convicted in Alabama in 1998 of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy, according to court records. The sentencing required him, among other things, to register as a sex offender and report all international travel.
The Jaguars hired Thompson as a contractor in 2013 to consult on the design and installation of their new videoboard network and later to operate the jumbotron on game days, investigators said. The team opted not to renew his contract in 2018 after learning of his conviction and status as a sex offender.
According to prosecutors, before Thompson’s contract expired in March 2018, he installed remote access software on a backup server in the Jaguars’ server room. He then remotely accessed computers that controlled the jumbotron during three 2018 season games, causing the video cards to malfunction repeatedly.
The Jaguars eventually found the backup server and removed access to the jumbotron, prosecutors said. The next time the server was accessed during a game, the team was able to gather network information about the intruder, which the FBI traced to Thompson’s home, prosecutors said.
The FBI executed a search warrant at Thompson’s residence in July 2019 and seized a phone, a tablet and two laptops, all of which were used to access the backup jumbotron server, according to log files. Agents also said they seized a firearm, which Thompson was prohibited from possessing as a convicted felon.
The FBI also found thousands of images and hundreds of videos of child sexual abuse on the devices. The files contained videos and images Thompson took at his home a month before the raid, showing children who had been in his care and custody, investigators said.
The Jaguars released a statement in November, following Thompson’s conviction, thanking federal prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for their work in the case.