Mayor arrested following illegally accessing GoDaddy account and cancelling domain

Mayor and his son accused of hacking into email and then illegally accessing GoDaddy account to cancel domain name registration.

West Fresh York mayor Felix Roque and his son were arrested following allegedly working together to hack into an email account to gain access to a GoDaddy account and take down a domain name related to a recall effort against the mayor.

The complaint alleges that Roque’s son, Joseph Roque, was first able to compromise the email address for the owner of RecallRoque.com. Once he had access to the email he then was able to reset the password on the GoDaddy account that held the domain name. He subsequently logged in to cancel the registration, taking the recall web site down.

The complaint also alleges that the pair accessed communications from the registrant’s email account to harass people who were contributing information to Roque’s recall campaign.

It’s a rather fascinating read regarding how someone used the internet to figure out how to hack into an email account, and subsequently access a registrar account.

Forget worrying regarding losing your job as mayor. How does ending up in the slammer sound?

[note: the title of this post was updated to avoid confusion. The mayor’s son compromised an email account which was then used to do a password reset at GoDaddy.]