14 DAY TRIAL // A 27-year-old Pennsylvania man was sentenced to three years in prison for stealing over $100,000 from a currency exchange service, after previously serving 13 months in jail for stock fraud.
Van T. Dinh made the news headlines in 2003, when at the the age of 19 he became the youngest person ever to be charged with identity theft instrumented through computer hacking in US.
The hacker broke into the online brokerage accounts of other people with the help of a trojan which he distributed as a stock market analysis tool.
He then used the account of a Massachusetts investor to buy $37,000-worth of his own overpriced stock options, an action that eventually earned him a 13-month jail sentence.
Fast forward to December 2008, when Dinh decided to get back to his old habits and cooked up a plan to defraud a New York online currency exchange service.
The hacker managed to obtain an administrative password, which he used to transfer a total of $110,000 into his own account and $140,326 in another one.
He was arrested by the FBI in May 2009 at his house in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, and pleaded guilty to fraud and identity theft in October that same year.
In addition to the three years in prison, which are to be followed by another three of supervised release, Dinh was ordered to pay $125,000 in restitution.
After instrumenting his first fraud operation, the hacker wrote in his diary that "I am so proud of myself for my ‘hacking business’ — I will never regret what I did. 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."
It seems that he was correct to assume that time in jail won't interfere with his hacking calling the first time. It remains to be seen if a three times longer sentence will.