In 2005, a man attempted to extort money from Verizon Communications and Comcast Corp. by cutting 18 cables that carried voice and data services. The man was reportedly angry and felt that the two companies were the reason he was unemployed.

Computer World reports that the documents regarding the case were released under The Freedom of Information Act, but that the defendant’s name was redacted from the files. Wired.com believes that the man in the case is one Danny M. Kelly, and unemployed engineer who lived at the time in Chelmsford, Massachusetts.

According to the original complaints in the court records, "Kelly sent a series of anonymous letters to Comcast and Verizon, in which he took responsibility for the cable cuts and threatened to continue and increase this activity if the companies did not establish multiple bank accounts for him and make monthly deposits into these accounts."

Kelly reportedly demanded that each of the companies pay him $10,000 per month or he would cut more cables. Each of the companies was told to set up website with bank account information provided for him to access the funds.

According to the complaint, "Both Comcast and Verizon did create the requested private Web pages in an effort to communicate with the extortionist and to gather information that might identify him. When Kelly accessed the Web pages, he did so via an anonymizing Web site through which he sought to hide the Internet Protocol address of the computer he was using and therefore hide his identity."

The FBI became involved in the case and requested a court order to use a spyware program called Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier (CIPAV) to identify the computer Kelly was using to access the websites.

The CIPAV program was used before in a case where bomb threats were being emailed to a high school in Washington. The software was installed onto Kelly's computer where it broadcasted his IP address and location to authorities, ultimately resulting in his arrest. The FBI didn’t specify how the software was installed onto Kelly's computer.

Kelly pled guilty to extortion and was sentenced to five years probation and ordered to pay Verizon $387,000 for the damage done to their cable network. Kelly was also court ordered to attend a mental health program.