IssViews Forum

High-living hacker swaps Porsche for porridge
Youthful swine jailed for fraud
By Robert Blincoe
Posted in Crime, 18th June 2010 10:34 GMT

A 21-year-old hacker was banged up yesterday for frauds netting him a Porsche, £40,000 in cash and £30,000 in gold bullion.

Alistair Peckover is serving 20 months after pleading guilty to two counts of fraud, and admitting 50 other offences which were taken into consideration.

Peckover targeted online betting sites, and also hacked individual email accounts. He exploited both BT and Google, and the companies have said they've fixed their holes.

Peckover both downloaded and wrote his own scripts to remotely view and control other individuals' computers. Sussex Police said he had been able to access the email account and the password of everyone that had bought an item using BT Openzone. Using this info Peckover checked which of them had Gmail and ended up with with access to 500 email accounts.

Peckover then filtered these with keywords including "sort code", "exp" or "amazon", and removed them from his victim's inbox without them knowing. Using "fake mail", he'd then continue corresponding with the original sender.