A man breaks into a local health club to promote his own security services

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A Kansas City man allegedly broke into a local health club and used the breach to offer his cybersecurity services to the victim company.

American court on Friday unsealed a federal grand jury indictment against 31-year-old Nicholas Michael Kloster, charging him with crimes related to computer hacking.

According to indictmentKloster was a member of a local health club. In April, he physically entered the fitness club just before midnight. The next day, he allegedly sent an email to the health club, claiming he could easily hack into the company’s IT systems.

“Kloster claimed in this email that he had “assisted over 30 small and medium-sized industrial companies in the Kansas City, Missouri area” and also attached a copy of what he described as his “resume,” which was significantly different from his original resume, which was – says the indictment.

Health club employees suspected something was wrong when they realized that Kloster’s monthly gym membership fee had been reduced to $1 and his photo had been removed from the company’s network. This led staff to believe that Kloster had stolen a gym employee’s name tag to help him commit the burglary.

Federal investigators also spotted Kloster bragging about the plan. “A few weeks later, Kloster posted on his social media profile a photo that appeared to be a screenshot of his desktop showing control of security cameras (at the health club) with a chat box with the message ‘how to get your company to use security services,'” the indictment reads .

Additionally, Kloster has tried to expand his program to include a nonprofit organization. He allegedly entered the nonprofit’s headquarters in May and hacked into a computer to change account passwords and secretly install the application VPN.

The indictment says that in order to hack into the companies, Kloster in March purchased from his former employer “a flash drive advertised as a way to hack vulnerable computers” using a company credit card. A few weeks later, Kloster’s employer fired him and “demanded that he return various stolen items to the company.”

Kloster was arrested on Friday. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.