A Dublin City Council employee has been found guilty of hacking into voicemail messages left on her former supervisor’s work phone. Severine Doyle (39), Parnell Court, Crumlin, Dublin, had pleaded not guilty to 11 charges of intercepting messages on a mobile phone used by Teresa Conlon, Dublin City Council’s head of housing allocation.
Dublin District Court heard that Ms Conlon’s voice-mail messages had been intercepted over five weeks, from January 8th until February 11th, 2010.
In evidence yesterday, Doyle claimed she was unaware it was a criminal offence to access messages left on another person’s phone. She said some city councillors had said they had listened to tapes of messages that had been left on her phone.
She said she did it to find the identity of a person who, she claimed, had been making nuisance calls to her which had intensified after a newspaper article was printed in 2009 alleging inappropriate allocation of housing by the council.
Judge Eamon O’Brien Doyle adjourned sentencing until December.