Man held website hostage for $10,000, failed, redirected it to porn, got busted

Enlarge (credit: Richard Lewis)

An Arizona man was sentenced Monday to four years of federal probation after he pled guilty to effectively holding a corporate website hostage and redirecting it to a gay porn site for several days in 2015. The defendant, Tavis Tso, was also ordered to pay over $9,000 in restitution.

According to Tso's June 2017 plea deal with federal prosecutors, the story began in 2011 when he was working for an unnamed IT company in Phoenix. Tso set up the company's account with GoDaddy, presumably for domain name and/or hosting services.

Nearly four years later, this company decide to update its contact information on the website and asked Tso for the login information on the GoDaddy account. He lied and told the company he didn't have the relevant information and couldn't help them. Then, Tso seemingly decided to expand what otherwise would have been an unremarkable incident.

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