One of them was a high school coach with a master’s degree in education.
The other has a degree in mathematics and worked for PNC.
Now, both of them are going to federal prison after admitting to illegally hacking into the Snapchat accounts of unknowing victims and selling and trading their intimate images online.
The ex-coach, Richard Alan Martz Jr., 36, of Meadville will serve eight years incarceration, and former PNC employee Dylan Miller, 33, will serve seven years. Both will also spend an additional five years on supervised release.
They were required to immediately turn themselves in to U.S. marshals following Thursday’s hearings to begin serving their sentences.
Martz and Miller pleaded guilty on May 26 to three counts each — conspiracy to commit wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and possession of child sexual abuse material.
Federal prosecutors charged seven people in the wide-ranging conspiracy that dated to 2020, although they have said that it involved as many as 275 people and hundreds of victims.
During Thursday’s hearings, Assistant U.S. Attorney Christian Trabold also asked Chief U.S. District Judge Cathy Bissoon to order the defendants to pay restitution to six victims.
The total cost among the victims submitted to the court is $56,311.
Both men must register as sex offenders because their victims included minors, and their sentences require them to participate in sex offender treatment.
“I hope you appreciate the hurt and harm your actions have caused — the sheer trauma of it all,” Bissoon said. “You abused your power, and obviously, the victims have to live with the consequences of that.
“I hope with time, they are granted peace.”
Thousands of images
For years, federal investigators said, the defendants in the case exchanged information on online platforms seeking out and then trading intimate photos and videos they illegally obtained by hacking into victims’ Snapchat accounts.
Sometimes, the hacking attempts would trigger Snapchat to send a legitimate authorization code to the real account holder, and then the defendants would simultaneously text them, masquerading as the company and asking for the code.
Once they had the code, the hackers could log in and reset the password and access the account, where they would look for intimate images.
According to investigators, Martz took “hacking classes,” from another of the defendants, beginning in 2020, paying him to learn how to do it. Then, Trabold said, Martz attempted to hack more than 600 accounts — and tracked his work in a spreadsheet.
As part of the hacking, the defendants would have to find a phone number associated with the accounts.
While Martz said in an online conversation with Miller that he would often find the phone numbers simply by doing a “background check,” Miller responded, “‘That’s what I usually do,’ ‘or through my work systems.”
“Investigators learned that Miller was employed at PNC bank, and Miller admitted to agents that he used PNC systems to obtain targeting information on victims,” Trabold wrote in a sentencing document.
Miller told agents he accessed approximately 200 Snapchat accounts without authorization.
As part of the investigation, Trabold said, agents found multiple screenshots on Miller’s phone of what appeared to be internal PNC software used for recordkeeping.
One image appeared to be a picture taken of a computer screen with a victim’s banking information identified, the prosecutor said.
In the online account where Miller kept the folders of photos, a folder matched that victim’s name and email and included explicit images and videos.
In at least one instance, Trabold wrote, Miller refused to allow a woman back into her Snapchat account unless she sent “nudes.”
Trabold told the court that Martz was the leader of the conspiracy while Miller used his job to facilitate it.
Neither man, the prosecutor said, would have stopped had they not been caught.
Speaking briefly to the court, both Martz and Miller apologized for their actions.
“I do regret what I’ve done,” Martz said. “I hope they can find forgiveness in their hearts.”
Miller told the court he has “remorse and regret deep in (his) soul.”
“I do want to be a good person and continue positivity for this life I’ve been given,” he said. “I’ll work to be the best human I can be.”
‘Vile’ and ‘pathetic’
During Thursday’s hearings, Trabold read an impact statement from one of the women identified as a victim in the case.
She told the court she considers all seven men who were indicted sexual predators.
“All of them bypassed consent to sexually exploit hundreds if not thousands of innocent individuals,” she wrote. “And I hold equal disgust for the 275 unidentified deviants who remain free.”
The woman called the crime “tech-enabled sexual abuse,” that could leave a digital footprint following her and other survivors for a lifetime.
“I am still actively living with the trauma caused by these individuals accessing my private images,” she wrote.
She told the court she was particularly disturbed by the conspirators’ efforts to get images of “local girls,” and people they knew “IRL,” or in real life, instead of “photos of unconnected, distant strangers from the internet.
“Their actions were calculated and purposeful. Richard wanted photos of victims associated with the high school he worked at.”
She called Martz “vile.”
“I hope you feel anxious about your prison sentence – I spent years dealing with this anxiety. I hope you lose hair and you develop TMJ like I did,” she wrote. “I hope you experience insomnia and struggle to sleep like I did. I didn’t do anything to deserve the side effects of your criminality. You deserve all the hate you receive, and you deserve all the physical manifestations that come with your crimes.”
She called Miller’s willingness to exploit people “pathetic.”
“There is no sincerest apology that will fix this. Your lawyer’s deepest condolences won’t return to me my time and tears. No amount of working on yourself and becoming a productive member of society will ever convince me that you are reformed,” she said.
“You made conscious, adult choices to hurt people, Dylan. The absolute cruelty toward the victims who begged you to release their accounts is next level malice. This was all so much more than collecting photos – you were out to harm people. And for your minor victims, you knew they were underage.”
Because of the crimes perpetrated against her, she wrote, she delayed starting a family with her new husband for three years.
“I had no idea who wanted me to hurt so much. I didn’t know any of the indicted men and I still have not figure out why I was targeted,” she wrote. ” I did not know if someone wanted to harm me specifically, or if my hack was collateral damage.
“It is not fair that I’ve paused my dreams because a grown man could not behave.”
The woman also told the court that she was disturbed to learn Miller worked for PNC.
“While I am glad that PNC fired him, I still consider this a catastrophic failure on the part of PNC’s privacy protocol,” she said.
A message left with a spokesperson for PNC late Thursday was not immediately returned.
She wrote that she spent her summer calling lawmakers across the state to try to strengthen laws around cases like these.
“I hate telling this awful story, but I will repeat it to every legislative office in the whole country if it means making people like Dylan known for what he is.”
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