A Kent man spent a night in the cells, was arrested and cautioned - for using the wrong kind of wifi!

The 29-year-old Deal man has issued a warning, after being locked up when he linked to a non-public server.

The man, who has asked not to be identified, was walking home late one night when he remembered he wanted to download a page from the internet on to his laptop.

As he approached a public house, he thought he would see whether there was a wi-fi connection. His computer identified an unsecured connection, so he logged in and downloaded one page. "Then a police patrol approached me and asked what I was doing," he said. "I told them what I had done because as far as I knew I had done nothing wrong.

"But I was then arrested, taken to the police station and spent a night in the cells.

"In the morning a solicitor was called and I was advised that I had committed an offence and I should accept a police caution so that it went no further. So I did, and I thought that was the end of it."

But when he applied for a job, his prospective employers did a police check and discovered he had a caution for an offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, and he didn’t get the job.

"Goodness knows what they thought I had been doing with a computer," he said. "They must have thought I was a paedophile, or had been trying to hack into other people’s computer systems or something."

The man said he was unsure how anyone would know whether an unsecured wi-fi internet connection was available to the public to use or not.

"Some are designed specifically for people to use, free of charge, and others may be just for customers of pubs and other premises. But how do we know which is which?

"I want other people to be aware of the dangers, and make sure they are not falling foul of the law as I did."

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