Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines is in hot water, and not just because they're sailing to the Bahamas.
It turns out Arvin Mirasol, a cabin stateroom attendant aboard several of their ships, was hiding cameras in passengers' bathrooms, uploading illicit video to the dark web, and, this one I'll quote because it's so bizarre:
Mirasol also stated that while the guests were taking a shower, he would enter the rooms and hide under the bed while recording them naked with his cellular device.
I don't know if you've been in one of those cruise ship rooms, but you can barely fit a couple in most of them, let alone some dude hiding under the bed.
Mirasol has already pled guilty and been convicted for possessing and distributing child pornography.
(Yes, some of the passengers he filmed were minors).
Federal agents and Broward County officers met Mirasol, a 34-year-old Philippines national, as the Symphony of the Seas returned to Port Everglades on March 3. During that cruise, he had admitted to ship security personnel to planting small cameras in passengers' cabins after one guest had discovered one in the bathroom, according to court documents. Royal Caribbean said it then notified federal authorities and had its security personnel detain him on the ship.
Searching his electronic equipment, including a USB stick device, law enforcement agents found 'several videos of naked females undressing in their bathrooms,' according to court documents and a criminal complaint from the Broward Sheriff's Office. One girl seemed to be 10 years old, they said.
But the victims and their families don't feel like enough has been done by the cruise line to compensate them for what happened.
'I was shocked. I was, I mean, in complete disbelief,' one of the plaintiffs, whose daughter was just 2 years old when they took the cruise, said. 'We entrusted our privacy, our safety with this cruise line, and to hear that our privacy was completely tossed out the window with this situation was really shocking to me.
'We want disclosure, we want accountability. Compensation would be ideal as well. For the most part, we want to make sure that this does not happen to anyone else's family.'
The federal investigators only notified those necessary to get a conviction in their case, but Mirasol had access to up to 960 passengers across several ships over the course of his employment, so there's no telling how many he recorded.
What is known is that as more and more people discover inappropriate pictures of themselves floating around the internet, the number of lawsuits against the cruise line is mounting.
So far, Royal Caribbean has refused to acknowledge the event in any way whatsoever.
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