BREAKING NEWS: Another Former Jaguars Employee Sentenced To Prison, This One For 220 Years
A former Jacksonville Jaguars staff member has been sentenced to over 200 years in prison for the second time in less than a month. Samuel Arthur Thompson, 53, was given the lengthy sentence by U.S. District Judge Brian J. Davis in Florida on Monday.
Thompson, from St. Augustine, received a 220-year sentence in November for various crimes, including creating, receiving, and having illicit images of minors, producing such images while obligated to register as a sex offender, breaching the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), and having a gun as a felon.
Additionally, he was convicted of hacking the scoreboard in the Jacksonville Jaguars’ EverBank Stadium as retaliation for the team not renewing his contract upon discovering he was a registered sex offender only after he had been hired.
Thompson was brought on board by the Jaguars around 2013 to provide expertise on the design and setup of their new Jumbotron. Subsequently, he was tasked with managing the Jumbotron on game days.
According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Middle District of Florida, Thompson was obligated under his contract with the Jaguars to disclose his criminal conviction, which he failed to do. Upon discovering his conviction and sex offender status in January 2018, the Jaguars decided not to extend Thompson’s contract.
Prior to the conclusion of his contract in March 2018, Thompson clandestinely installed remote access software on a spare server in the Jaguars’ server room. He then used this access to disrupt the operation of the Jumbotron during three NFL games in the 2018 season, leading to recurrent malfunctions on the video boards.
Thompson’s prior criminal record included a conviction for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy in Alabama in 1998.
Following an investigation, the Jaguars concluded that the disruptions were a result of a deliberate actor issuing commands through the spare server.
To address the issue, on December 16, 2018, the Jaguars created a decoy system (referred to as a ‘honeypot’) by isolating the server on its own network and cutting off its connectivity to the other computers that managed the Jumbotron. During the subsequent NFL game, the spare server was once again accessed remotely in an attempt to manipulate the Jumbotron.
The Jaguars successfully pinpointed the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the intruder during this incident, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation later tracked it back to Thompson’s residence.
In 2020, he was arrested when the Philippines extradited him to the United States for illegal departure after the FBI conducted a search at his residence, confiscating several computers, an iPhone, and an iPad.
Samuel Arthur Thompson became the second ex-Jacksonville Jaguars staff member to receive a prison sentence in March.
Earlier in the same month, Amit Patel, aged 31, was sentenced to 78 months in prison with a three-year supervised release term. He was also instructed to reimburse nearly $22 million that he had stolen from the team after admitting guilt to charges of wire fraud and unlawful financial transactions.
