Two former staff members of Ridge Radio have been charged with ‘account fraud’ by Australian Federal Police for illegally hacking in to the station’s website and causing havoc with the station’s administration.
Based in Bateman’s Bay on the NSW south coast, Ridge Radio Australia is a progressive community station with the catchphrase, “Playing more of what you wanna hear.”
The two ex-staffers, who cannot be named at this stage and had both moved on to land jobs at commercial stations, will face court in coming weeks. They have already been sacked from their jobs according to Ridge Radio. The pair apparently tried to delete whole playlists and rotations.
“They changed passwords and sent emails to staff, purporting to be from me, telling them they’d been sacked,” said a station spokesperson. Clients of the station were also sent bogus emails.
The station called the AFP, who took only three days to track down the would-be super hackers who left clues everywhere.
“I’m still shocked on how these people involved could do such a thing in an industry that they love. They’ve ruined their radio careers,” a spokesperson said.
Ridge Radio is an online radio station and does not have a community licence and/or an AM/FM transmission.
Unfortunate that these two individuals have done something illegal and will potentially get in to quite a lot of trouble, but I'd be interested to hear why they left the station in the first place. Also, interesting to note the similarities between the Grant Broadcaster operated stations of the South Coast's imaging and branding, and the imaging and branding of this internet commercial broadcaster.
(Correction to your story - the station is most certainly not a community station, nor in a category I would say is progressive, unless you say typical CHR stations are progressive.)