A former Jacksonville Jaguars employee has received a prison sentence for the second time in less than a month.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Brian J. Davis in Florida sentenced 53-year-old former Jaguars employee Samuel Arthur Thompson to more than 200 years in prison.
After being found guilty in November of creating, receiving, and possessing child sex images, creating such images while needed to register as a sex offender, breaking the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), and having a firearm while a convicted felon, Thompson, of St. Augustine, was sentenced to 220 years in prison.
Additionally, he was found guilty of hacking the Jumbotron at EverBank Stadium, home of the Jacksonville Jaguars. The team had not renewed his contract, having discovered after he started working there that he was a registered sexual offender.
About 2013, Thompson was employed by the Jaguars to provide advice on the layout and configuration of the team’s brand-new Jumbotron. He was also tasked with managing it during games.
“Thompson was required by his contract with the Jaguars to disclose his conviction, but he chose not to. Following discovery of Thompson’s conviction and status as a registered sex offender, the Jaguars decided in January 2018 not to extend his contract, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Middle District of Florida.
“Thompson installed remote access software on a spare server in the Jaguars’ server room prior to his contract expiring in March 2018.” Then, during three NFL games in the 2018 season, Thompson gained remote access to the computers that managed the Jumbotron, resulting in frequent malfunctions with the television boards.
In 1998, Thompson was found guilty of sexually abusing a fourteen-year-old child in Alabama.
The announcement went on, “The Jaguars conducted an investigation and found that a malicious actor was using the spare server to send commands, which was the cause of the outages.”
The Jaguars established a “honeypot” on December 16, 2018, by cutting the server’s connection to the other computers in charge of the Jumbotron and placing it on their own network. The backup server was once more remotely accessed during the subsequent NFL game, and an attempt was made to utilize it to issue commands to the computers running the Jumbotron.
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation was able to trace the intruder’s IP address—which the Jaguars were able to obtain—to Thompson’s home.”
He finally left the country illegally in 2020, and the FBI executed a search warrant at his house, taking several computers, an iPad, and an iPhone. The FBI then deported him back to the United States, and he was arrested.
Samuel Arthur Thompson is the second former employee of the Jacksonville Jaguars to get a prison sentence in March.
Earlier this month, after admitting guilt to felony charges of wire fraud and unlawful financial transactions, Amit Patel, 31, was sentenced to 78 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. He was also ordered to repay over $22 million that he embezzled from the team.
