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For the second time in less than a month, a former Jacksonville Jaguars employee has been sentenced to prison.
On Monday, former Jaguars employee Samuel Arthur Thompson, 53, was sentenced to more than 200 years in prison by U.S. District Judge Brian J. Davis in Florida.
Thompson, of St. Augustine, was sentenced to 220 years after being convicted in November of producing, receiving and possessing sexual images of children, producing such images while required to register as a sex offender, violating the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), and possessing a firearm as a convicted felon.
He was also found guilty of hacking the Jumbotron in the Jacksonville Jaguars’ EverBank Stadium after the team didn’t renew his contract after finding out after his employment had began that he was a registered sex offender.
Thompson had been hired by the Jaguars around 2013 to consult on the design and installation of the Jaguars’ new Jumbotron and was then given the job of running it on game days.
“Thompson’s contract with the Jaguars required him to report his conviction, but he did not. In January 2018, the Jaguars determined not to renew Thompson’s contract after learning of his conviction and status as a registered sex offender,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Middle District of Florida said in a press release.
“Before the expiration of Thompson’s contract in March 2018, Thompson installed remote access software on a spare server in the Jaguars’ server room. Thompson then remotely accessed computers that controlled the Jumbotron during three 2018 season NFL games, causing the video boards to repeatedly malfunction.”
Thompson had been previously convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy in Alabama in 1998.
“After conducting an investigation, the Jaguars determined that the outages were being caused by a malicious actor sending commands via the spare server,” the release continued.
“On December 16, 2018, the Jaguars set up a ‘honeypot’ by putting the server on its own network and removing its access to the other computers that controlled the Jumbotron. During the next NFL game, the spare server was again remotely accessed and attempted to be used to send commands to computers controlling the Jumbotron.
“The Jaguars were able to capture the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the intruder – which the Federal Bureau of Investigation traced to Thompson’s residence.”
He was eventually arrested in 2020 after the Philippines deported him back to the United States after he fled the country illegally following the FBI executing a search warrant at his home, seizing multiple computers, and iPhone and a iPad.
Samuel Arthur Thompson is the second former Jacksonville Jaguars employee to be sentenced to prison in the month of March.
Earlier this month, Amit Patel, 31, was sentenced to 78 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release and ordered to pay back almost $22 million that he embezzled from the team after pleading guilty to felony charges of wire fraud and illegal monetary transactions.