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Michael Fish, age 26, of Albany, was sentenced to 111 months (just over nine years) behind bars Friday, May 20, on charges of computer fraud and aggravated identity theft, according to the US Attorney’s Office in the North District.
It follows a 2020 guilty plea in which Fish admitted to hacking into dozens of female classmates’ school email accounts at SUNY-Plattsburgh and then using information from those accounts to access their social media accounts, federal prosecutors said.
Once in the accounts, he stole nude photos and videos of the victims and traded them with others online, according to prosecutors.
He also admitted to possessing several videos of child pornography on his laptop in 2019, prosecutors said.
The hackings occurred between 2016 and 2019 while Fish was an undergraduate, and later a law student, at the school.
Because of the crimes, the university spent thousands of dollars and allocated staff to identify compromised accounts, resetting passwords, and notifying students and parents, prosecutors said.
As part of his sentence, Fish was ordered to pay more than $35,000 in restitution to the school and will have to serve 15 years of supervised release.
He’s also facing new charges of obstructing justice after he allegedly submitted six fraudulent character letters to the court during sentencing proceedings, according to prosecutors. That case is still pending.
A second man, Nicholas Faber, age 25, of Rochester, was given a three-year prison sentence in 2021 after pleading guilty to computer fraud and aggravated identity theft and admitting that he took part in Fish’s scheme.
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