14 DAY TRIAL // The curious and incredibly funny case of Zachary J. Landis, 27, concluded yesterday, when a judge in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, sentenced him to 2 to 4 years in prison for hacking-related charges, as ABC27 is reporting.
If you're not familiar with Mr. Landis' case, it all started this past March, when Mr. Landis, facing an ever-mounting collection of fines and court costs, decided to hire a "hacker" to break into the local court's computer system and wipe out his debts.
To carry out his master plan, Landis created an account on Craiglist with his own safe-mail.net email address and then put up an ad where he asked for the services of a computer hacker.
The ad eventually made its way to the desk of Detective Matthew Dotts of the Derry Township Police Department, who started an undercover conversation with Landis, to see if this was a hoax or the real deal.
Police was alerted to Landis' Craigslist ad
When Detective Dotts found out of Landis' plan, he forwarded the investigation to Detective Gregory Wahl from the Lancaster County Computer Forensics Unit.
Detective Wahl continued conversations with Landis, who began to trust him, and later sent Wahl three criminal docket sheets and one miscellaneous docket with Landis' name on it.
Landis was asking the "hacker" to remove those fines (a few hundred dollars) from the courts' computer system as a test of his abilities, before moving on to removing the rest of his debt and negotiating full payment details.
Landis was careless, used his real name, personal email, didn't hide his IP address
During their conversations, Wahl managed to convince Landis to take a screengrab of his computer. This data was very useful, since Wahl was able to see that Landis was logged into his Gmail account at the moment of the screenshot.
Correlating data from the dockets, the screengrab, Google, and Landis' local ISP, Wahl moved on to arrest Landis at the beginning of April, for charges of Criminal Solicitation to Commit Unlawful Use of a Computer, Computer Theft, Computer Trespass, and Tampering with Public Records or Information.
Landis only owed $25,000, of which $16,000 to the court, and $9,000 in damages to a victim from a 2008 assault case.