Convicted child molester and ex-Jaguars employee sentenced to 220 years in prison for producing child sex abuse material and hacking Jacksonville stadium jumbotron

A convicted child molester was sentenced to 220 years in federal prison after he was found to have produced child sexual abuse material and hacked into the jumbotron at the Jacksonville Jaguars’ stadium after the team learned he was a registered sex offender and He fired him.

A federal judge in Jacksonville on Monday sentenced Samuel Arthur Thompson, 53, of St. Augustine, according to court records.

He was 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, sending unauthorized harmful commands to a protected computer and possessing a firearm. like a convicted felon.

Thompson was arrested in early 2020 after being deported from the Philippines to the United States, authorities said.

He had fled to the Southeast Asian country about six months earlier, after the FBI executed a search warrant at his home and seized several of his computers, according to a criminal complaint.

According to court records, Thompson was convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy in Alabama in 1998. Among other things, the conviction required him to register as a sex offender and report any international travel.

The Jaguars hired Thompson as a contractor in 2013 to advise on the design and installation of their new video board network and then to operate the jumbotron on game days, investigators said.

The team decided not to renew his contract in 2018 after learning of his conviction and sex offender status.

According to prosecutors, before Thompson’s contract ended in March 2018, he installed remote access software on an additional server in the Jaguars’ server room.

He then remotely accessed the computers controlling the jumbotron during three games of the 2018 season, causing the video cards to malfunction repeatedly.

The Jaguars eventually found the spare server and removed access to the jumbotron, prosecutors said.

The next time the server was accessed during a game, the team was able to gather network information about the intruder, which the FBI tracked to Thompson’s home, prosecutors said.

The FBI executed a search warrant at Thompson’s residence in July 2019 and seized a phone, a tablet and two laptop computers, which had been used to access the spare jumbotron server, according to search files.

Agents also said they confiscated a firearm, which Thompson was prohibited from possessing as a convicted felon.

The FBI also found thousands of images and hundreds of videos of child sexual abuse on the devices.

The files included videos and images that Thompson had produced a month before the raid on his home that showed children who had been in his care and custody, investigators said.

The Jaguars issued a statement in November, following Thompson’s conviction, thanking federal prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for their work on the case.