Australian woman haunted by ex via her Tesla — which he hacked, controlling the speed, locks and temperature. And it could happen to anyone

The Sydney woman — a mother and a survivor of four years of domestic abuse, according to the police — discovered the controls when her ex followed her three days later.

“You thought you’d get away with this,” he shouted at her, yelling about a man she’d been dating, The Guardian reports. “I am in your car. I am in your maps.”

Her abuser took complete control of her Tesla

Over the next several days, the woman learned that, not only could he see where she was and where she was going, but he could also control nearly everything within the vehicle — from its lock system and speed to its climate settings and curfew hours. In other words: Pucci could determine when the car could even be driven.

Between November 6 and November 12, 2025, he remotely controlled the car’s climate settings, alternating the temperature between extremely hot and extremely cold, The Guardian reports. According to the police documents, he also turned on “Valet Mode,” which immediately reduces the Tesla’s speed to just 40 kilometers per hour, “causing significant safety issues for the victim on the road.”

“The victim has not had any control of her vehicle since she noticed the parental control profile,” the police reported. “The accused has been the only one with access to the vehicle’s controls utilizing the Tesla app.”

Pucci was convicted of 30 domestic violence-related charges against his ex, including using the Tesla car app to harass her, making seven attempts to disconnect her car from its charging port via the Tesla app and using “multiple methods to dominate” her.

Pucci — who, in 2017, was hit with nearly $450,000 in fines after his cleaning firm treated some foreign workers as unpaid “slaves” and, in 2021, was disqualified from managing corporations for the maximum period of five years due to his “involvement in the failure of three companies” that owe nearly $10 million to creditors — pleaded guilty to the charges before Parramatta local court in western Sydney.

Judge Peter Feather sentenced him to two years and three months with a non-parole period of 15 months.

“When viewed cumulatively, [it] amounts to conduct that’s both coercive and controlling in nature, reflecting a pattern of behavior designed to entrench power and compliance,” Feather said during his sentencing remarks, according to The Guardian.

She survived a history of abuse

Taking control of her Tesla wasn’t the first act of abuse Pucci committed against his ex.

In a previous March 2020 incident, which ultimately led to a conviction of common assault, the woman told Pucci that she wanted to break up while the pair was in the car with her then-two-year-old son. He threatened that it would “be the last time [she] sees her son if she ended the relationship,” forcibly took her phone and typed a message to her ex-husband stating that “she could not care for her son and wished to give him up.” He also “forcibly removed [her] from her car and dragged her to a nearby pillar, pinned her against it and said, ‘say goodbye to your son’” before driving off with the child, leaving her with neither her phone nor her child.

According to the police documents obtained by The Guardian, Pucci returned a few minutes later, grabbed her arm and said, “I hope you comprehend what will happen to you if you break up again.”

Again, in 2021, he strangled her to the point that she recalls “fighting” for her life,” according to the documents.

“Everything went quiet, and the victim blacked out,” the report reads. “The victim believed she was going to die.”

Pucci is appealing against his sentence for 30 offences — including eight counts of stalking or intimidation with the intention to cause fear or physical harm, six counts of common assault, two counts of choking a person without consent, one count of using a carriage service to threaten to kill and one count of using a carriage service to menace, harass or offend — according to The Guardian.

He is scheduled to be in court again in late October.

Domestic abuse isn’t always blatant abuse

Domestic abuse isn’t always as obvious as threatening or physically hurting someone. It can also involve coercive control — a repeated pattern of behavior designed to intimidate, isolate, monitor or control another person.

“Perpetrators use coercive control to deprive another person of liberty, autonomy and agency,” according to the Australian Institution of Health and Welfare (AIHW).

Coercive control can include anything from domineering someone’s finances and deciding who they can see to restricting access to accounts and threatening their children. In some cases, as in the Australian woman’s case, perpetrators may also use technology to interfere with victims’ daily lives, which is known as technology-facilitated abuse (TFA).

“TFA can take the form of stalking, surveillance, tracking, threats, harassment and the non-consensual sharing of intimate images,” according to the AIHW. “Perpetrators may misuse devices, accounts, software or platforms to control, abuse and track victim-survivors. In intimate relationships, TFA can enable violence to occur or continue.”

While coercive control, with or without technological facilitation, is “almost always an underlying dynamic of [family and domestic violence] and intimate partner violence,” according to the AIHW, “physical and/or sexual violence do not need to be present for coercive control to occur, or for it to have harmful or traumatic consequences.”

Control can be covert — or it can be subtle, making it more difficult to prove in court, which is, in part of a larger systemic issue, why abuse too often continues and, at times, claims lives. One in five adults — 3.8 million people — experienced physical and/or sexual violence from a partner, date or family member in 2021, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Personal Safety Survey (PSS). Women are adversely affected.

In the U.S., an average of 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. That adds up to more than 12 million women and men over the course of a single year. Women are about three times as likely to be victims of abuse and report that it had a related impact on their functioning. Moreover, most female victims, like the woman above, were previously victimized by the same offender.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner says digital technology is increasingly being used as a tool of coercive control. In one study cited by eSafety, 42% of women who reported experiencing coercive control said a partner had abused or threatened them online or used technology to control or stalk them.

Is Tesla at all responsible?

The recent Australia case raises a legitimate question about whether or not technology companies have a responsibility to design connected products with domestic-abuse scenarios in mind.

Tesla’s documentation confirms that its app allows users to remotely access their vehicles, while vehicle settings allow owners to enable or disable mobile access. Tesla also offers security features such as PIN to Drive, which requires a four-digit PIN before the vehicle can be driven.

The issue, however, is that a feature designed for convenience can potentially become a tool for coercive control when an abusive partner retains digital access. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner specifically warns that smart cars and other connected devices can be repurposed to monitor, control and intimidate victims, and says manufacturers should consider safeguards such as clearer information about who has access to a device, notifications when accounts or sensors are accessed, and stronger protections around remote permissions.

“One of the greatest and rapidly evolving challenges in tackling domestic, family and sexual violence is technology-facilitated abuse,” Minister for Social Services, Tanya Plibersek said in a statement. “The weaponisation of technology by perpetrators requires new thinking and approaches. It’s a new frontier that we have to tackle.”