14 DAY TRIAL // Three female agents working for a real estate agency from Rockingham, North Carolina, have been charged with unauthorized access of computer information. According to the authorities, the three women hacked into the e-mail account of a rival realtor and accessed confidential business messages.
Kim Dawn Whitley, 40, and Jamie Moss-Godfrey, 41, both from Rockingham and listed as the owners of RE/MAX Tri City Realty, along with Wendy Robson Massagee, 43, of Hamlet, working for the same company, have been served with arrest warrants last Thursday. They stand accusations of hacking into the Hotmail account of Nicole Hayden, an agent with Exit Realty.
According to the warrants, between March 1 and March 20, 2009, they "unlawfully and willfully did without authorization access a computer program, a paid Hotmail account, and viewed private and personal business E-mail belonging to Nicole Hayden of Exit Realty by using Hayden’s username and password without permission to do so."
The offenses represent a misdemeanor and the three women have been released after their signed written promises to show up in court on April 23. The Rockingham police has also seized 13 computer systems from the office of RE/MAX Tri City Realty and has taken them for forensic analysis.
The alleged victim, Nicole Hayden, notes that she wasn't aware that her e-mail account was compromised. "We didn’t know about it until we were informed, and the police did their job," she comments, according to the Richmond County Daily Journal.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at anti-virus vendor Sophos, warns that the number of such incidents might increase in the near future. "As competition gets stiffer and we see more firms struggling during the credit crunch, we shouldn't be surprised if we see workers in some firms break the law to keep their necks above water," he maintains.
"What people need to realise is that unauthorised access of someone else's computer system is a crime, and can carry stiff penalties. It may feel quite different to type in someone else's username and password into a PC than to break into an office in the dead of night to rifle through their filing cabinets, but it's still against the law," Mr. Cluley concludes.
Update: The charges against Wendy Robson Massagee were dismissed on July 10. According to SC Magazine, Kim Dawn Whitley and Jamie Moss-Godfrey, the other two defendants in this case, will have to perform community service.
In an e-mail to Softpedia, Ms. Robson Massagee, who is currently trying to clear her name, noted that Nicole Hayden, the victim in this case, used to be an RE/MAX agent herself. Furthermore, she claims that, when Ms. Hayden quit in order to start up her own company, she left her e-mail login credentials stored on the company's computers and subsequently failed to change her password.