ORANGE COUNTY, CA – An arrest warrant has been issued for Verizon employee Jesus Rosales’s after he was charged with one count of felony theft for stealing photos off a customer’s phone. Melanie V, who has been a long-standing Verizon customer, went to the store where Rosales worked at to purchase a new phone. Melanie V accepted Rosales’s offer to transfer her photos from her old phone to her newly purchased phone, and in the process Rosales texted himself Melanie V’s personal and private photos. Rosales was arrested and charged with violation of California Penal Code section 502(c)(2), but after being released from custody, Rosales fled jurisdiction and has yet to be located by authorities. Melanie V, who is represented by Jorgensen & Salberg, is currently suing Verizon for damages.
Theft of personal images from customer phones is not unknown to Verizon and its employees. In 2017, Arron Hoch, a manager of a Verizon dealership, was charged with one count of felony theft. After investigating Hoch’s residence, police found multiple electronic devices that contained personal photos of women in states of undress and nudity; the women in the pictures said that the photos were stolen from them when they went into Hoch’s store to transfer data from their old phones to their new phones.
Another Verizon employee, Barton Scott, was convicted of a felony in 2015 for sending explicit messages and photos of his genitalia to teenage girls, who’s information he took from Verizon’s database. Scott served a year in prison after blackmailing teenagers into sending him nude photographs.
Theft of personal photographs from private devices has been in the spotlight since the 2012 leak of celebrity photographs. Multiple celebrities had their private photos involving nudity hacked from iCloud’s data storage and released to social media aggregates such as 4chan and Reddit. The release of hacked photographs gained mass attention, gaining nicknames such as “Celebgate” and bringing massive traffic to the websites that hosted the pictures. Social media sites soon received heavy criticism for harboring hacked personal photos and led to the sites banning all postings of the hacked photographs. Still, as seen in the case of Melanie V, private photos can still be targeted by hackers. If you suspect or know that your private photos or data has been compromised, contact Jorgensen & Salberg to see if you can be compensated for damages.
California Penal Code 502 allows for victims to bring civil action against the violator for damages suffered: the damages consist of lawyer fees and any fees and costs needed to prove that the victim’s personal computer and electronic property was compromised. Jorgensen & Salberg has an excellent record in achieving amazing settlements for their clients.
So, if you find yourself in a similar situation, then do not hesitate to call Jorgensen & Salberg to receive the best legal representation.
