Ex-Michigan coach Matt Weiss shown on security footage at time of hacking attempts, feds say
Security footage captured former Michigan co-offensive coordinator Matt Weiss minutes before he allegedly hacked college students’ personal accounts to steal sexually explicit photos and videos, an FBI search warrant affidavit alleges.
A new filing in Detroit federal court on Friday, obtained by The Athletic, included a dozen photos of Weiss that investigators say were taken during hacking attempts in December 2022.
Investigators say Weiss, who was Michigan’s co-offensive coordinator during the 2022 season, visited the football facility at Schembechler Hall multiple times that December and accessed athletes’ personal accounts from computers in the quarterbacks and tight ends meeting rooms. The Detroit News first reported the story.
The surveillance footage helped persuade a federal magistrate judge in March 2023 to let FBI agents search 14 electronic devices belonging to Weiss and the university. The search warrant documents had previously been sealed in federal court. But after Weiss’s attorneys asked a judge to suppress evidence gathered from the warrants — calling them “blatantly unlawful” — prosecutors responded Friday with a motion seeking to deny Weiss’s request.
According to the affidavit, authorities collected devices from Weiss’s office, his home and Michigan’s quarterbacks and tight ends room.
“No evidence obtained from the (University of Michigan Police Department) search of the devices under the device warrants was included in the FBI affidavit. Weiss’s motion therefore fails, under any chain of analysis,” Assistant United States Attorney Timothy J. Wyse said in the motion response Friday.
Michigan information technology staff discovered passwords for 46 alumni email accounts had been reset in November 2022, traced to computers at Schembechler Hall, Michigan’s practice facility, according to the affidavit. Surveillance footage allegedly shows Weiss resetting nine alumni passwords from his office computer between 10:33 a.m. and 12:55 p.m. local time on Dec. 21, 2022, after he entered his office at 10:09 a.m.
Prosecutors say there was another hacking attempt on Dec. 25, 2022, when Weiss unsuccessfully tried to access a laptop belonging to tight ends coach Grant Newsome, now the Wolverines’ offensive line coach. Surveillance footage allegedly shows Weiss walking into and out of Newsome’s office at the time of the hacking attempt.
Weiss is accused of transferring data from the victims’ accounts to an external storage account, as he attempted to override two-factor protection and passwords.
The initial indictment in March alleged that Weiss gained access to a third-party database used by more than 100 colleges and universities and obtained personal information about more than 2,000 athletes and 1,300 additional students and university alumni.
Weiss faces 14 counts of unauthorized access to computers and 10 counts of aggravated identity theft. The maximum sentence includes five years in prison for each charge of unauthorized access and two years for each count of identity theft.
Former Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh hired Weiss in February 2021 to coach the Wolverines’ quarterbacks. He was later promoted to co-offensive coordinator, alongside Sherrone Moore, who is now facing charges for an alleged home invasion of a female Michigan staffer. Weiss was fired in 2023, while Moore was let go earlier this month.
Both Matt Weiss and Sherrone Moore are facing criminal investigations related to alleged misconduct while at Michigan (Robin Alam / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
In November, Weiss asked the judge to throw out a portion of the computer hacking criminal case. He also accused the prosecution of pursuing an untested legal theory.
“If its gambit succeeds, computer hacking that ordinarily leads to probation will be transformed into an offense with a two-year mandatory minimum sentence of incarceration for each act of hacking — up to 20 years total,” David Benowitz, Weiss’s lawyer, wrote in a previous motion to dismiss some of the charges, citing the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
“The login identifiers were just virtual keys used to unlock virtual doors. No one’s identity was stolen. No fraud crime was made possible because of a particular person’s claimed identity. Unlocking the virtual doors allowed a later virtual trespass. But the alleged crime is a computer trespass, not aggravated identity theft.”
If he’s sentenced to the maximum, Weiss could face more than 70 years in prison.
