Cell phone salesmen accused of stealing customers' nude pictures


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BARTOW, FL -- Two cell phone salesmen in Polk County are out of a job and facing serious charges after police say they stole nude pictures off a customers' phone and then bragged about it later.

Investigators say one of the workers obtained the photos when transferring the customers' data to her new cell phone.

A few days later, police say the workers showed off the photos to another customer who happened to recognize the woman.

"To show them to a complete stranger is obviously a sign of them bragging about it," said Detective Sergeant David Wyant with the Bartow Police Department.

Officers arrested Gregory Lampert on Wednesday. Police are waiting for the other employee, Joshua Stuart, to return from vacation.

"I would never want my cell phone to go out of my eye sight," said Dhiman Bhattacharjee, Owner of iPhone Repair of Lakeland.

In his position, Bhattacharjee says he understands what he is entrusted with and follows one general rule of thumb.

"Whenever we transfer data, we always do it in front of our customers. A lot of times we'll have a customer bring their own lap top or their PC or mac and we'll help them transfer or make a backup of their phone," he said.

Bhattacharjee says there is no reason for employees to ever go to the back of the store and handle your phone.

The safest bet, he says, is to transfer your old pictures and data to your new phone all on your own.

This can be done easily on most smart phones using the cloud and services like Google.

"I think that's the best way to do it," he said.

A spokesman for Cellular Sales of Knoxville, which runs the Bartow store, says they're extremely shocked by what happened and are "working like crazy to ensure it never happens again."

While the store may look like a Verizon Wireless store, it's not. It's a third-party authorized reseller.

A Verizon Wireless spokesman said customers' privacy is their top priority and the store and two employees will be held accountable for their actions.

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LOL. Shouldn't have happened, obviously, but damn. If you don't want anybody to see those pics, how about save them off yourself and get them away from the device before you hand it over to someone else?

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If you *really* don't want people to find nudes of you, then get them off your phone when you know others will be dealing with it... people cannot be trusted with this sort of stuff.

To be fair though, if they're on someone's phone then usually they're meant to be sent to someone else, so after that point it's kind of in the air anyways.

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Browsing through pictures on someone's computer was pretty much standard practice for any shop I've ever worked at. Found some really cool (and occasionally really sick) stuff. Sometimes it was hard to keep the smiles off of our faces when a woman came in to pick up her computer after we had seen countless nude pics of her while working on her computer.

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Browsing through pictures on someone's computer was pretty much standard practice for any shop I've ever worked at. Found some really cool (and occasionally really sick) stuff. Sometimes it was hard to keep the smiles off of our faces when a woman came in to pick up her computer after we had seen countless nude pics of her while working on her computer.

LOL! What's the coolest/best thing you've found? :laugh:

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Browsing through pictures on someone's computer was pretty much standard practice for any shop I've ever worked at. Found some really cool (and occasionally really sick) stuff. Sometimes it was hard to keep the smiles off of our faces when a woman came in to pick up her computer after we had seen countless nude pics of her while working on her computer.

Some guys have all the luck. :D

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