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.
An Indian man who came to the US from Latin America without proper documents has died while in federal custody in Atlanta, in Georgia state, according to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
Navin Shankar Subramaniam Xavier, a resident of Florida, was the former Chief Executive Officer of Essex Holdings, the company through which he carried out two fraud schemes.
New York City police say a Canadian woman remains in very critical condition a day after a speeding car slammed into pedestrians in Times Square in what authorities said was a deliberate attack.
Pakistan on Friday filed a plea in the ICJ for it to rehear within six weeks the case of alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav, after the government was slammed by the opposition for "mishandling" the case at the world court.
The family of famed Sufi Qawwal singer Amjad Sabri, who was shot dead in Karachi last June, has requested the Pakistan government to provide them security, a media report said.
