'Shocked': Park City cell phone store employee accused of stealing customer's nude photos

PARK CITY (ABC4 News) – A cellphone store employee was arrested Friday for stealing from a customer. He didn’t take money but rather something much more sensitive and personal.

According to Park City Police, an unnamed woman visited the Victra Verizon Store to upgrade her iPhone 5 to an iPhone 8 on October 23rd. They say 24-year-old employee Esteban DeJesus Anica was helping her transfer her data to the new phone, but she had to leave to pick up a child from school while the transfer was in progress.

When she logged into a laptop synced to her phone she saw that several text messages had been sent to an unknown phone number and according to a probable cause statement “Those messages contained several nude photos of the complainant from the complainant’s photo roll.”

When she texted the number “…the individual apologized and admitted sending the photos to himself.” To make matters worse, the victim started receiving strange phone calls from unknown numbers in Utah and California.

On Friday police arrested Anica for “Computer Crimes” a third degree felony.

Casey Powell works on other people’s cellphones all day as a Master Trainer for employees of Bad Apple’s nine stores and says customers should store their photos on a separate device or app.

“One is called Photo Vault which pretty much you can just transfer your photos just to that specific app and you have to have a PIN passcode to actually get into that,” Powell told ABC4 News. “You can even just delete all the photos off your phone before you bring it in to do a data transfer to a new device like this situation like looked what happened. That way they wouldn’t even have access to it regardless…Here at Bad Apple we always try to respect everyone’s privacy as best as we can so to hear that someone didn’t respect that privacy and went and just did whatever he wanted for his greediness. It sucks to hear.”

On Monday the store issued a statement reading in part: “…we take our customers safety and privacy seriously and are shocked by the allegations that an employee could have done this. We are and will continue to do everything we can to support the investigation”

As for Mr. Anica, he’s currently free after posting $5,000 bail.