UK Hacker Grant West Has Been Sentenced to Prison
Grant West, known by his internet name Courvoisier was sentenced to 10 years and 8 months jail for stealing the personal details of 63,000 credit and debit cards to be sold as “fullz” on the darknet site Alphabay.
West used brute force attacks to hack into the databases of companies like Just Eat to acquire email addresses. He would then send a survey to these addresses asking them to answer a few questions before confirming a few personal details in order to gain a fake ten-pound discount. See more information about the case here.
The details were then sold on Alphabay in exchange for bitcoin, at a rate of twenty pounds per card. Alphabay was taken down mid last year and found to have over 400,000 users.
However, police have failed to account for 1.6 million pounds in bitcoin which West will likely retain after serving out his sentence.
Judge Gledhill states that “this should be a wakeup call to customers, companies and the computer industry to the very real threat of cybercrime.”
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