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."
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