Beaufort phone store clerk stole nude photos while transferring customers’ data, suit says
If you’re in the market for a new phone, be careful with who transfers your data to the new device — especially if your images are private and personal.
An employee at Beaufort’s T-Mobile/Connectivity Source store has been accused of sending himself hundreds of nude photos from the phones of unsuspecting customers, according to a lawsuit filed last week in Beaufort County civil court.
The suit claims the plaintiff, Beaufort husband and father Alfonso Estrella, visited the T-Mobile location on Robert Smalls Pkwy on May 18, 2022 to buy a new phone. James Tu, a store employee, helped him with the purchase, telling Estrella he could leave the store while his data was transferred to his new device.
The customer returned an hour later, retrieved his phone and left — but he later noticed a text sent from his phone to a number he didn’t recognize. The messages forwarded “private pictures” of his wife and young child, including nude photos of his wife and photos of their daughter in the bathtub. When Estrella called the unknown number, Tu answered on his phone at the T-Mobile store, according to the court summons.
Returning to the store to confront the employee, Estrella was eventually able to look through Tu’s camera roll on his work phone. There he found a “hidden photos” folder with hundreds of “compromising photographs” of other women — presumably also secretly obtained from customers’ phones, the lawsuit alleges. On an iPhone, users can choose to add certain photos to a “Hidden” album so they don’t appear in the phone’s library.
The lawsuit is filed against Connectivity Source, Lipsey Communications (owners of Connectivity Source), T-Mobile USA, Inc. and James Tu, individually. According to language in the lawsuit, Connectivity Source and T-Mobile “jointly do business at their offices.”
‘Openly and casually’ scrolling through customer’s photos
In-store security camera footage shows Tu “openly and casually” scrolling through the customer’s photos while he was meant to be transferring data, according to court documents. The lawsuit also claims the customer’s private photos were posted online on “dark web” forums and shared via Discord, a messaging app primarily used for gaming.
Although it is not known whether Tu has been criminally charged in connection with these accusations, the 31-year-old from Beaufort was arrested twice in the latter half of 2022 for fraud charges. One arrest was connected to his alleged second-degree violation of South Carolina’s Computer Crime Act, which entails fraudulently accessing a device to obtain money or any other property. A spokesperson from the Beaufort Police Department did not immediately respond to questions related to Tu’s pending criminal charges.
Court documents also allege management at the Beaufort T-Mobile location on Robert Smalls Parkway mishandled the situation’s aftermath. Instead of conducting a proper investigation, staff simply “destroyed the chip” from Tu’s work phone, failing to consider whether the employee could have transferred the photos somewhere else, according to the court summons.
Filed Thursday, the lawsuit seeks full damages from its three defendants: T-Mobile USA, Tu as an individual employee and Connectivity Source, a T-Mobile authorized retailer that runs the Beaufort location. The Charleston-based attorney who represents Estrella’s family did not immediately respond to a request for comment left early Monday afternoon.
Representatives from the T-Mobile location in Beaufort or the wireless carrier’s corporate office also did not answer questions Monday, including inquiries into whether Tu was still employed at the store. Representatives from Connectivity Source also did not respond.
