A woman recently sentenced to state prison for identity theft was charged Friday in U.S. District Court in San Jose in the wiretapping of a police officer's phone and possessing illegal spyware, the U.S. Attorney's Office reported.
Kristin Nyunt was charged with two counts of illegal wiretapping and possessing an illegal interception device while living in Monterey County from 2010 to 2012, U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag said.
According to federal prosecutors, Nyunt intercepted communications, including sensitive law enforcement information, using "spy software" she allegedly installed on the mobile phone of a police officer.
She is also charged with illegally having interception devices, including spy software brands such as Mobistealth, StealthGenie and mSpy, knowing that they were designed for surreptitious interception of wire, oral and electrical communications, prosecutors said.
Last month, a judge in Monterey County Superior Court handed down a sentence of eight years and four months on Nyunt for multiple charges of identity theft, forgery and computer network fraud in a plot involving her husband, John Nyunt, while he was a commander of the Pacific Grove Police
Department.
The couple had created an unlicensed private detective company and customers who hired them later became victims of identity theft, county prosecutors said.
In April, John Nyunt was convicted of threatening his wife with violence to prevent her from revealing the scheme and with burglary and other felony charges and sentenced to three years in state prison.
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On Sept. 29, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Hammad Akbar, 31, a resident of Pakistan and chief executive of the firm InvoCode Pvt. Ltd., for allegedly creating StealthGenie to make it possible to intercept calls on Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Blackberry mobile phones.
