Man pleads guilty to accessing intimate images of victims through Snapchat accounts

Michael Yackovich is one of seven people charged with hacking.

By PAULA REED WARD
TribLive

A West Newton man pleaded guilty in federal court Tuesday to hacking into hundreds of individual Snapchat accounts, accessing intimate videos and images stored there and then trading them online.

Michael Yackovich, 30, will be sentenced June 22 on charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft by Chief U.S. District Judge Cathy Bissoon. A plea agreement calls for him to serve four years in federal prison to be followed by three years supervised release.

Ryan Tutera, who represents Yackovich, said his client has taken responsibility for his actions and is looking to move forward.

“He recognizes the harm he caused the victims,” Tutera said.

Yackovich is one of seven people charged in the case. He is the first to plead guilty.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Christian Trabold told the judge on Tuesday that investigators identified 140 victims of the crime. An additional 151 people who are victims are unlikely to be identified, he said.

Trabold spent several minutes during the plea hearing outlining the sophisticated nature of the conspiracy.

According to investigators, the defendants exchanged information on online platforms seeking out and then trading intimate photos and videos that they had illegally obtained by hacking into the victims’ Snapchat accounts.

In some cases, Trabold said, the defendants’ actions would trigger Snapchat to send a legitimate authorization code to the real account holder, and the defendants would simultaneously text them, as well, masquerading as the social media company and request that code.

“Once they had the Snapchat code, they could then log in, reset the password in many instances and review the account contents,” Trabold told the court. Then, he continued, the defendants would access a user’s intimate photos or videos and either download them or screenshot them to later post elsewhere online.

The defendants referred to those as “wins,” Trabold said. They created folders for individual victims, collecting several images and videos in each, and then saving or selling them, he continued.

“The defendants would often describe the quality of a folder in their negotiations, which included the volume or degree of nudity or sexual activity included in a folder,” Trabold said.

Folders with many such images were considered to be “loaded” by the defendants, often demanding a higher payment.

The co-conspirators talked online and posted their hacking services for trade or payment. They often shared their lists of victims, referring to some of them as “mutuals,” who were the friend of a friend of the co-conspirators, or as “IRL,” for people they knew “in real life,” Trabold said.

“Because of the effort used to obtain these images, multiple actors in this conspiracy maintained hundreds to several thousand images and videos collected over multiple years,” Trabold told the court. “It was commonplace for actors to send lists of victim names for trading and for actors to have several hundred victim folders.”

Yackovich was identified after investigators tracked his display name, “oArouse,” and matched it to an email and multiple IP addresses that were identified in the Snapchat exports provided to the FBI.

In an interview with investigators in May 2022, Yackovich admitted to attempting to access approximately 500 Snapchat accounts.

“I accessed Snapchat accounts of women without their consent,” he wrote in a statement. “I would trick them into giving me the information I needed to reset their password by pretending to be Snapchat.”

Yackovich told investigators he never targeted anyone under 18.

“I never threatened anyone nor have I ever extorted any after taking their explicit files,” he wrote.

Yackovich also admitted to conspiring with Edward Grabb, who formerly worked as an officer with the Westmoreland County Park Police, South Greensburg police, the Westmoreland County sheriff’s office and later as a trooper candidate for the Maryland State Police. Charges against Grabb, of Jeannette, are still pending.

In his interview with investigators, Yackovich identified a Dropbox account folder titled “Local Girls,” which he said he and Grabb had been “mostly responsible for.”

When investigators went through Yackovich’s digital devices, they found more than 250 victim folders in the “Local Girls” folder, with several hundred more victim folders in his Dropbox and Google Drive accounts.

In addition, Trabold said, the chat history on Yackovich’s phone dated back to July 2020 when he sought images of a specific person at the high school where one of the co-conspirators, Richard Martz, of Meadville, coached. Trabold did not identify that school Tuesday, and a call to Martz’s attorney was not returned.

Martz’ charges are also still pending.