Former Teen Stock Swindler Sentenced to Three Years on New Hack

Van T. Dinh, now 27, once served time for an online stock-trading scheme when he was 19. During this time he hacked into another trader’s account and bought the options with his own account. This act made Dinh the first person charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with a fraud that involved both computer hacking and identity theft.  This led him to serve 13 months in prison in 2004. After his previous attacks and after being released from prison, he was just recently sentenced to three years in prison in New York on new charges of cracking a New York-based currency exchange service and gifting himself with more than $100,000. Dinh was ordered to pay $125,000 in restitution for the scam and to serve three years of federal supervised release. In 2003, Dinh found himself to be the unhappy owner of Cisco “put” options that were very close to expiring without a payoff. Instead of absorbing the losses, he had used a Trojan horse program that was disguised as a stock charting tool to take control of an innocent person’s online stock account. After doing this, he then had the victim’s account buy $37,000 worth of his options, shaving his losses.

            After his first release, Dinh’s probation officer had concluded that he was not seriously applying himself to secure employment. Then in December of 2008, he had set up a real account with an online currency exchange serviced that was based in New York. Two weeks after this, he had logged into his account using an administrative password and added $55,000 to his account. He had soon done the same and added another $55,000 two days later. According to an FBI agent, Dinh then used his access to make currency trades on two different customer accounts, and then gave one of them $140,326.75. This hacking was traced by the FBI to an IP address that was assigned to a home in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, where Dinh shared a home with his mother.  Dinh was arrested and was held in jail, without bail, at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. He was labeled as being a danger to the community by hacking activities, along with other reasons. Dinh then pleaded guilty to computer fraud and identity theft.

            Dinh also thought that he had a sense of humor, and believed that what he had done was funny in many different expenses. At his sentencing hearing at his earlier case, prosecutors read from an electronic diary found on Dinh’s computer. It read, “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.”

Article Name: Former Teen Stock Swindler Sentenced to Three Years on New Hack 

by Kevin Poulsen

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/dinh-2/