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.
A 21-year-old Indian-origin woman was jailed for three months in Singapore on Wednesday for shoving a policeman in the chest and pinning him against a wall in a chokehold while he was trying to question her about a scuffle involving at least six people.
The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) has honoured three activists for espousing the rights of Kashmiri Pandits with the 2019 Award for Advancement of Hindu Human Rights.
Nearly 200 Indians on their way back home from the Kailash Mansarovar pilgrimage in Tibet are stuck in Nepal’s Humla district due to alleged mismanagement by private tour operators, pilgrims claimed on Wednesday.
The tourist bus was carrying 31 passengers of different nationalities. They were returning from Oman to Dubai after Eid-ul-Fitr holidays. It took a wrong turn and crashed into the 2.2-metre high barrier that fell and ripped through the vehicle.
The parents of the six-year-old Indian girl who had died of a heat stroke near a remote and deserted US-Mexico border said they sought asylum in the US because they desperately "wanted a safer and better life for her", according to a media report.
