Indian-origin hacker gets 51 months jail for computer fraud in US
Darpan News Desk IANS, 24 May, 2023 12:52 PM
ew York, May 24 (IANS) A 38-year-old Indian-origin hacker from Virginia was sentenced to more than four years in prison for hacking into computers and stealing customer credit card numbers.
Chirag Patel from Norfolk pleaded guilty to computer fraud and was sentenced by US District Judge G Murray Snow to 51 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.
He also was ordered to pay $87,522.25 in restitution, the US Attorney's Office for the District of Arizona said on Monday.
According to a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), between August 2017 and July 2020, Patel hacked into the Phoenix-based computers of an international hospitality company on numerous occasions.
He then fraudulently transferred and redeemed customer reward points from the company's customer loyalty program.
In addition, Patel also stole credit card numbers and other personally identifying information (PII) from customers and loyalty program members, which were stored in the company's computers.
Patel took screenshots of customers' and members' information, which included credit card numbers and other PII, and saved the screenshots to a Google Drive he controlled.
In total, between August 2017 and July 2020, Patel stole and possessed more than 1,200 credit card numbers, the FBI investigation found.
He used some of the stolen credit card numbers to make unauthorized purchases and also tried to sell some of the stolen credit card numbers.
His intent was obvious — to show that in the arena of the American attention economy, where the fighting forever rages, Donald J. Trump remains a potent force. Commanding attention has been his world, and politics is a realm of attention. Whether the legal realm, which he has successfully avoided until now, will be anywhere near the same for him may be another reality entirely.
In total, Trump is facing 34 counts of falsifying business records, all of them allegedly "with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof," the now-unsealed indictment reads.
Trump became the first former President to be arrested and face a trial in the nation's 246-year history, plunging the US into unchartered legal and political territory. He is also a candidate for next year's presidential election, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination, and only two per cent behind President Joe Biden in polls.
One expert says Thursday's historic indictment of a former president is sure to make the line between politics and justice even more blurry. Neama Rahmani, a former assistant U.S. attorney who's now a personal injury lawyer in California, says prosecutors have always been wary of politically sensitive cases.
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The attack was reported from the Covenant School in Nashville, a private Christian school for students in pre-school to sixth grade, when the students are roughly 11 or 12 years old, the BBC reported.
