A man has been arrested after bragging about his top secret experience in the US government on Linkedin.

Charles Harvey Eccleston, 62, attempted to sell a list of classified emails to a foreign government, but was arrested after he tried to send phishing emails to up to 37 Department of Energy computers.

Mr Eccleston, a former Department of Energy employee who had been fired, lived in the Philippines and had wanted money to stay in the country with his local wife.

He walked into an unnamed embassy in the capital, Manila, and offered the list of Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) emails for $18,800.

According to Mr Eccleston’s Linkedin page, he had work for the NRC between 2008 and 2010, and at the Department of Energy from 1988 to 2001, where he claimed his clearance level was “top secret”.

Representatives from the unnamed country contacted the FBI, who discovered the man had bragged about working on “top secret DOD projects” on his Linkedin profile.

In an undercover sting operation, FBI agents posed as foreign officials to whom Mr Eccleston sold 1,200 NRC email address for $5,000 plus $2,000 for expenses. He also offered to sell details on the “two highly classified, unnamed US government programs” he worked on for $100,000.

If Mr Eccleston is convicted on the three charges of unauthorised access to a computer and one of wire fraud, he could face up to 50 years in prison.