Hacker jailed for targeting Call of Duty gamers

It’s a bad week for British hackers as another youth has been handed a prison sentence.

20-year-old Lewys Martin from Kent is a repeat offender that, among other things, masqueraded a keylogging Trojan as a “patch” for the popular Call Of Duty game and used it to steal personal and financial information from unsuspecting victims.

It’s interesting to note that this crime wasn’t the one for which he had been initially arrested – he was arrested for breaking in a number of local colleges and trying to steal computer equipment and other devices such as projectors and walkie-talkies.

After he was caught, the police raided his home, where they found printouts of over 300 credit card numbers, codes, and PayPal login credentials.

According to the prosecution, he didn’t use this information himself, but sold it online to cyber criminals who paid up to $5 for a set of credit card details. The money he earned that way was placed in an offshore account in Costa Rica.

“We don’t know how much money he got through selling the card details because the money is in a bank which won’t co-operate with the authorities,” said the prosecutor. “But Martin admitted to police that it was in the thousands of pounds.”

Another interesting thing is that Martin was tried once before for similar break-ins in November last year, and his sentence was deferred and he was allowed to attend a computer course at a university in Canterbury.

His lawyer asked for this sentence to be suspended as well, in order to allow him to finish that course, but the judge decided against it and sentenced him to 18 years in prison.