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The US government says it has found the man behind the massive iCloud celebrity photos hack

The US government has arrested a man it says is behind the 2014 leak of hundreds of naked photographs of celebrities including Kate Upton, Jennifer Lawrence, and Ariana Grande.

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Fusion reports that Ryan Collins, 36, from Pennsylvania will plead guilty to a felony violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as to one count of unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information.

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Jennifer Lawrence. Getty Images

So how did he allegedly do it?

The government says Collins used "phishing" emails to retrieve passwords to celebrity iCloud and Gmail accounts, sending emails pretending to be from Apple asking celebrities to reset their password. When they entered the information, the government says, it went to Collins.

This isn't the first person the FBI has investigated in connection to the stolen photos. It raided the house of a man named Emilio Herrera in 2014 and left with "several computers, cellphones, a Kindle, floppy disks, hard drives, and thumb drives." Herrera was not charged at the time.

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Interesting here is that the US government isn't accusing Collins of publishing the images online; it's charging him only with obtaining the images. We still don't know the identity of "OriginalGuy," the username of the person (or group of people) who leaked the images online. OriginalGuy said he paid for many of the images using bitcoin, but it's not clear whether the photographs were sold to him by Collins.

Here's what OriginalGuy said about the leak of photos at the time:

I didn't take the money and run. Shit got weird once I started posting samples. AnonIB must have IP blocked me. I was spending all of my time trying to find proxies, and then when I could get on the site, was being hammered by everyone and I couldn't even post. I got some private requests through email, but none ever came through. People wanted shit for free. Sure, I got $120 with my Bitcoin address, but when you consider how much time was spent acquiring this stuff (I'm not the hacker, just a collector), and the money (I paid a lot via Bitcoin as well to get certain sets when this stuff was being privately traded on Friday/Saturday) I really didn't get close to what I was hoping for. Mainly because of the extra Bitcoin spammers spamming their own address ... I proved I had shit, but people wanted more and more for free ... When I posted samples, someone was tracking me, trying to find me. My ISP kept cutting out. Weird emails were coming in. It kinda freaked me out and I had to leave for a couple of hours.

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