By: Audrey Wang

An ex-Amazon worker claimed she had been looking for digital insecurities so they could be fixed. A jury found her culpable of wire fraud and hacking charges.

Paige Thompson, a former Amazon engineer who was accused of stealing customers’ personal online information from the banking company Capital One in one of the largest violations in the U.S, was found guilty of using wire fraud to gain wealth and hacking charges on Friday, June 17th.

A Seattle jury found that Thompson, 36, had broken an anti-hacking law known as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which forbids unauthorized access to a computer. The jury found her not guilty of identity theft and access device fraud, despite her other charges.

Thompson had worked as a software engineer and ran an online community for her other workers in the enterprise. In 2019, she downloaded private information belonging to more than 100 million Capital One users. Her legal team argued that she had used the same methods as ethical hackers, who hunt for software weakness, and report them to companies so they could be repaired.

In return, the Justice Department said that Thompson had never planned to alert Capital One about the problems that gave her access to customers data, and that she’d bragged to her online friends about how many vulnerabilities she had found and the data she had downloaded. They also said that Thompson used her access to Capital One to mine the cryptocurrency.

Andrew Friedman, an assistant U.S attorney, said, “she wanted data, she wanted money, and she wanted to brag,” in closing arguments.

The jury debated for 10 hours before finding that Thompson was indeed guilty, with 5 accounts including the wire fraud charges. In the end, this case caught the attention of multiple tech industries, because of Thompson’s charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Critics say that the law is much too broad and allows the prosecution of the so-called white hat hackers.

In 2020, in efforts so settle the claim of security measures, the bank agreed to pay 80 million, and in December, the bank also agreed to pay 190 million to people whose data had been exposed because of Thompson.