Recidivist youngster sentenced for new hack

27-year-old Van T. Dinh has been sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay $125,000 in restitution for having breached an online currency exchange service operating from New York and illegally transferred $110,000 to his own account.

This news wouldn’t be so interesting were it not for the fact that this isn’t the first time Dinh has been caught hacking. Back in 2003, when he was only 19 and working as a stock trader, he hacked into another trader’s account in order to buy worthless stocks from himself.

According to Wired, this made him the first person ever to be charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with fraud involving both computer hacking and identity theft, and he was sentenced to 13 months in prison.

This time, Dinh opened up a legitimate account with the online currency exchange service, then hacked its way into the system and two weeks later managed to access it as an administrator. He then proceeded to funnel $55,000 to his legitimate account, and repeated the action a couple of days later.

He also accessed to other user accounts, made currency trades on them and added some $140,000 to one of them. The FBI managed to trace the IP addresses from which the accounts were accessed to Dinh’s home and arrested him. He has plead guilty to identity theft and computer fraud charges.

Back when he was arrested in 2003, the prosecutors revealed Dinh’s thoughts about the hack to the court by reading an entry form a diary he kept.

“I am so proud of myself for my “hacking business’ — I will never regret what I did,” Dinh wrote. “I am the best of the best trickster. I laugh often when Mom says she worries -¦ Even if I go to jail, big deal: I will learn something there. Hahaha,” he wrote.

Unfortunately for him, he hasn’t learned the most important thing: how to keep himself from returning inside.