Journalist Sting Lands Computer Repair Technician in Jail

A sting performed by journalists at computer repair shops around London last year, ended with a conviction for one of the technicians caught abusing customer trust. Grzegorz Zachodni, 30, received a nine month prison sentence for trying to log into an online banking account using a password found on a computer brought to him for repairs.

Last year we reported how journalists from Sky News rigged a laptop to record all activity and took it at various PC repair shops around London to test if the personnel misuses the personal data found on them. The notebook came with an easy-to-fix technical issue, a loose memory module, but more importantly a folder intentionally named "private" containing photos of a woman in bikini and a file with passwords for social networking accounts and online banking.

From all the cases of customer trust abuse that the investigation uncovered, one stood out in particular. That of a technician from Laptop Revival in Hammersmith, who not only browsed through the pictures in the private folder, but also copied them on a personal USB stick, probably for closer inspection at a later time. In addition, he tried using the passwords found in the text file to log into what he thought were his customer's accounts, including the online banking one.

Obviously, he didn't succeeded since the access codes were intentionally bogus, but he clearly showed an intention to. At least that was the opinion of the Metropolitan Police, who charged one Grzegorz Zachodni, 30, with attempted fraud for the deed.

"You were, in every sense of the words, caught red-handed by this operation. There is a need to deter others in your position from abusing the trust placed in them," the judge said when handing him a nine-month jail sentence. "Hopefully this conviction will be a warning to the computer repair industry that the copying or use of customer's private and personal information is not acceptable," Detective Constable Chris Young from Metro Police's Economic and Specialist Crime Unit, also commented for Sky News.