Another former Jaguars employee sentenced to prison, this time for 220 years.
For the second time in less than a month, a former Jacksonville Jaguars employee has been sentenced to jail.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Brian J. Davis in Florida sentenced former Jaguars employee Samuel Arthur Thompson, 53, to more than 200 years in prison.
Thompson of St. Augustine was sentenced to 220 years in prison after being found guilty 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 at the Jacksonville Jaguars’ EverBank Stadium when the team declined to renew his contract after discovering he was a registered sex offender after his job began.
Thompson was hired by the Jaguars in 2013 to consult on the design and installation of the team’s new Jumbotron, and he was later assigned the responsibility of running it on game days.
Thompson’s contract with the Jaguars obliged him to reveal his conviction, which he did not do. The Jaguars decided not to renew Thompson’s contract in January 2018 after learning of his conviction and status as a registered sex offender, according to a news release from the United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida.
“Before his contract expired in March 2018, Thompson installed remote access software on a spare server in the Jaguars’ server room. Thompson then remotely accessed the systems that controlled the Jumbotron during three NFL games in 2018, causing the visual boards to constantly malfunction.
Thompson was previously convicted of sexually abusing a 14-year-old child 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 news statement went on to say.
“On December 16, 2018, the Jaguars set up a ‘honeypot’ by connecting the server to its own network and denying it access to the other computers that controlled the Jumbotron.” During the next NFL game, the spare server was remotely accessed again and attempted to send commands to the Jumbotron’s control systems.
“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 finally apprehended in 2020 after the Philippines deported him back to the United States after he fled the country illegally after the FBI executed a search warrant at his residence, taking multiple computers, an iPhone, and an iPad.
Samuel Arthur Thompson is the second former Jacksonville Jaguars employee condemned to jail in March.
Earlier this month, Amit Patel, 31, was sentenced to 78 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release and had to repay over $22 million that he embezzled from the team after pleading guilty to felony counts of
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