Saudi prince may be responsible for stealing Jeff Bezos’ nudes

By: Nicholas V.

The crotch shots that put Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ personal life in the public eye last year may have been stolen by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a bombshell report alleges.

The Saudi royal “hacked” the world’s richest man’s phone by sending him a malicious video file via the chat platform WhatsApp during a “seemingly friendly” exchange, according to The Guardian.

Hidden in the encrypted message was malware that allowed “large amounts of data” to be exfiltrated from Bezos’ phone within hours, The Guardian reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.

The paper noted that it had no knowledge of what exactly was taken from the phone. But the shocking cyberattack was discovered by digital forensic experts who were examining Bezos’ phone after the National Enquirer threatened to publish details of the Amazon chief’s private life, including below-the-belt selfies he sent to his girlfriend, TV reporter Lauren Sanchez, early last year.

Bezos announced a divorce from his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie Bezos, in January after learning that the National Enquirer was reporting on his extramarital affair with Sanchez. A month later, Bezos accused the Enquirer of trying to blackmail him with a series of racy pics, including the penis pic and a photo of Sanchez “smoking a cigar in what appears to be a simulated sex scene.”

In a shocking blog post on the Web site Medium, Bezos claimed executives of David Pecker’s American Media Inc., which owns The Enquirer, were holding the pictures over his head as part of a scheme to get him to publicly say the Enquirer’s coverage wasn’t “politically motivated.”

The cryptic post mentioned Saudi Arabia numerous times.

Bezos’ investigators have “high confidence” that Mohammed bin Salman delivered the video that allowed the Saudis to get into the CEO’s phone and “[gain] private information” about him, according to the report.

Bezos owns The Washington Post, whose columnist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered and dismembered via bone saw at the hands of the Saudi government. Saudi experts told The Guardian that this relationship was likely the impetus for the attempt to humiliate Bezos.

An Amazon representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.