The student who acted as his lookout got 18 months' probation

Mar 1, 2014 15:06 GMT  ·  By

25-year-old Roy Chaoran Sun, a former student of Purdue University, has been sentenced to 90 days in prison for hacking into the school’s computer systems to change his grades. Sun has been sentenced to four years, but he will spend most of the sentence on supervised probation. 

Sun wasn’t the only one involved in the scheme. Mitsutoshi Shirasaki and Sujay Sharma were also charged back in June 2013.

According to Jconline.com, Sharma was sentenced to 18 months’ probation. Initially, investigators believed that Sharma had also changed one of his grades. However, he was actually only acting as a lookout for Sun and Shirasaki.

Sun said they had changed one of his grades, but Sharma knew nothing about their intentions.

After the investigation started, Shirasaki fled to Japan. In January 2014, Sun pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit computer tampering and two counts of computer tampering, while Sharma pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit computer tampering.

Sun and Shirasaki used keyloggers to steal their professors’ passwords. They changed their grades just minutes before the professors had to submit final grades for the semester, to make sure no one would notice the modifications.

In 2009, Sun attended only one of his classes, in which he got an honest A. For the rest of the classes, he simply changed his grades.