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 petition has been filed in the Sindh high court, seeking Durrani’s disqualification as he has “demotivated people from participating in the electoral process”.
India can help the US keep an eye on Pakistan as President Donald Trump has “taken tougher approach to Islamabad harbouring terrorists”, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haleyhas said.
The US Navy Seals were ready to mount an operation inside Pakistan, similar to the covert raid that killed Osama bin Laden, if it failed to act decisively on a US tip off to rescue a Canadian-American family abducted by the Haqqani network in 2012, according to a media report.
The United States is India's "reliable partner" at the world stage in this period of uncertainty and angst, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said today, sending a strong signal to side with India amidst China's "provocative actions" in the region.
Founded in 2003, the South Asia Initiative became a University-wide interdisciplinary institute in 2010 under the leadership of its current faculty director, Indian-American Tarun Khanna, the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School
