Billie Conley Jr.

Introduction

Billie Conley Jr., 47, formerly of Shelton, Connecticut, was sentenced on October 19, 2026 to nine months of imprisonment and three years of supervised release for operating a computer intrusion scheme against a client who had hired him to set up her company’s network — a scheme in which prosecutors say he installed unauthorized remote-access software, repeatedly disabled the network to manufacture repair business, and diverted company funds to pay his own debts. The sentence was imposed by U.S. District Judge Victor A. Bolden in New Haven. Conley pleaded guilty to wire fraud on June 1, 2026, and the case was announced by United States Attorney David X. Sullivan for the District of Connecticut.

Background Information

Conley owned and operated Ridgefield Tech, LLC, through which he offered information technology consulting services. In approximately September 2023, the owner — identified in court documents only as “Individual-A” — of a funeral services business (“Company-A”) hired Conley to assist with setting up a computer network and video surveillance system for the company. When Conley installed Company-A’s computer network, he also installed, without authorization, software that permitted him to remotely access the network. That hidden access, prosecutors established through court documents and statements made in court, became the mechanism for everything that followed: control over a client’s systems that the client did not know existed.

The business relationship quickly developed the pattern prosecutors would later describe as a protection racket in miniature. Shortly after the network installation, Company-A began experiencing a variety of service issues that required Individual-A to contract with Conley to resolve — for a fee. Conley offered Individual-A an “IT Service Agreement” that would have locked in monthly payments to Ridgefield Tech beginning in February 2024 in lieu of pay-per-service-call pricing. Individual-A declined the contract.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

Convicted and sentenced. Conley pleaded guilty to wire fraud on June 1, 2026, and was sentenced on October 19, 2026 to nine months of imprisonment and three years of supervised release. His conviction is a matter of court record.

After Individual-A declined the service contract, the disruption escalated. Between January and September 2024, Conley remotely disabled Company-A’s computer network on 21 separate days — days on which the funeral services business was unable to conduct business at all. For a company whose work is organized around scheduled services and grieving families, twenty-one days of outages across nine months meant lost capability on the industry’s most time-sensitive days, and each outage fed the cycle of paid repair calls that prosecutors say Conley engineered.

In August 2024, Individual-A hired another company — “Company-B” — to resolve the network problems. Company-B was unable to regain control over much of the network infrastructure that Conley had installed, and Individual-A had to pay Company-B for labor and replacement equipment simply to recover her own systems. The investigation also revealed a second stream of loss: between June and August 2024, Conley unlawfully used Company-A’s bank account to make approximately $9,070 in payments to companies that he and Ridgefield Tech owed money to — effectively treating a client’s operating account as his own payable ledger. Judge Bolden will order restitution after additional court proceedings, so the final restitution figure remains to be set.

Public Reaction and Consequences

The case was announced by U.S. Attorney David X. Sullivan, whose office framed the outcome around the breach of professional trust: a consultant hired to build a client’s systems had instead used them against her. The matter was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Neeraj N. Patel. For the small-business community the case served as a documented example of insider computer intrusion — not a faceless hacker from outside, but the very contractor the victim hired and paid.

The immediate consequences are the sentence itself — nine months in federal prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release — plus restitution, which Judge Bolden will order in the amount determined by additional court proceedings. The nine-month term sits alongside Conley’s separate detention: he has been in state custody on unrelated charges since December 2, 2024, and is scheduled to be released from state prison in September 2027.

Current Status

Conley, 47, is a convicted wire-fraud felon awaiting the restitution phase of his case. He will serve his nine-month federal sentence following his September 2027 release from state custody on the unrelated charges, and will then be subject to three years of supervised release during which federal authorities can monitor his activity and his work with computer systems. The victim’s losses — the replacement equipment, the remediation labor, the $9,070 in diverted payments, and the cost of twenty-one dark business days — will be reduced to a restitution number by the court. His Ridgefield Tech consulting operation, the business vehicle for the scheme, is effectively concluded by the conviction itself.

Impact on Their Career/Life

Conley built his livelihood on being the person small businesses call when their technology fails — and the court found, through his own guilty plea, that he manufactured the failures. A wire-fraud conviction forecloses that career: IT clients run background-sensitive trust relationships, and a felony conviction for turning remote access into a weapon against a funeral home’s operations is disqualifying in practice for consulting work of the kind Ridgefield Tech offered. The supervised-release term will put his computer use under federal oversight into 2030. And the case leaves a specific reputational marker: the scheme’s victims were a funeral services business and its customers, a fact that made the intrusion not just criminal but, in the prosecutor’s framing, a betrayal of the client relationship at its most vulnerable point.

Sources

• U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Connecticut, “Former Shelton Resident Sentenced for Computer Intrusion Scheme,” October 19, 2026 — source