A 21-year-old McDonald's employee in Britain has been jailed for 12 months after hacking into Selena Gomez's Facebook page and personal email, which contained messages between her and boyfriend Justin Bieber.
In January 2011, Gareth Crosskey tricked Facebook staff into resetting Selena's Facebook password by pretending to be Selena's stepfather, who runs his daughter's account.
He posted a YouTube video boasting how he hacked the page, and contacted US tabloids offering information about the 19-year-old Disney starlet and her not-yet-public relationship with pop star Justin.
He also contacted Selena's stepfather and manager Brian Teefey saying he had hacked at least four personal email accounts, attaching lovey-dovey emails sent between Selena and Justin.
Gareth was said to have posted "Justin Bieber sucks" to Selena's six million Facebook fans, which apparently resulted in "a large quantity of mail, what you might deem hate mail" to Selena, her lawyer said.
Investigators tracked down the hacker's IP address and the WiFi network he used at his workplace, McDonald's. Now enrolled to do a university course designing computer games, the hacker apparently conducted the cyber-attack because his own Facebook account had been hacked.
He also claimed he wanted to prove to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that his social networking site's new "security system is crap".
The judge told Gareth, "You are clever with a computer and you hacked into the private part of somebody's Facebook account — that somebody was a singer, a celebrity called Selena Gomez."
He later concluded, "People deserve privacy and should not their private correspondence by email made public. People are entitles to privacy even those who seek publicity."
