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.
At least five people were killed and more than 40 others injured after a vehicle rammed into a crowd at an annual holiday parade in Waukesha, a city in the US state of Wisconsin, authorities said on Monday.
Satveer Singh, an Indian citizen serving as Head Granthi at Gurdwara Karte Parwan, Kabul, for the past twenty one years and Sorjit Singh, Afghan Citizen hailing from Khost Province and caretaker of Gurdwara situated there, were evacuated on Thursday.
The incident happened inside a multi-storeyed building in Lyari area of Karachi, the provincial capital of southern Sindh province, police officials told local media.
The World Health Organization says coronavirus deaths in Europe rose 5% in the last week, making it the only region in the world where COVID-19 deaths increased. The U.N. health agency said confirmed cases jumped 6% globally, driven by increases in the Americas, Europe and Asia.
As Vice President Kamala Harris grapples with a portfolio of seemingly intractable issues and responsibilities that have drawn her away from the national spotlight -- she Zoomed into the infrastructure Cabinet meeting from Paris on Friday -- other Democrats have raised their own national profiles, the report said.
According to Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's technical lead on Covid, almost all of the up to 900,000 Covid cases sequenced worldwide over the last 60 days originated from the delta strain
