The U.S. Department of Justice reported on Tuesday, that Hieu Minh Ngo, 25 years old and a Vietnamese citizen is serving a 13-year prison sentence, for allegedly hacking personal information of nearly 200 million U.S. people by intruding American company's computer system. The Vietnamese citizen sold the information to other criminals online and made more than $2 million in the process.
Leslie Caldwell, Assistant Attorney General, stated in the press release that "Criminals buy and sell stolen identity information because they see it as a low-risk, high-reward proposition," Leslie Caldwell also said,"Identifying and prosecuting cyber criminals like Ngo is one of the ways we're working to change that cost-benefit analysis."
The Department of Justice did not give any details on how Hieu Minh Ngo did his cyber crime, however, the Vietnamese hacker worked from his home in Vietnam intruding the computer systems between 2007 and 2013.
The Department of Justice said that once the hacker got connected with each company's computer system, Hieu Minh Ngo then extracted files such as full names, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, Social Security numbers, bank accounts, and details about credit cards.
The Vietnamese hacker's next move was to advertise the files he'd gathered, which he called "fullz" and was a website he owned. The hacker also ran the site superget.info and findget.me. It has been reportedl that the sites he owned are now shut down.
Ngo's customers around the world then use the U.S. citizens personal information to file fraudulent income tax returns which reached to about 13,673 Americans, bought through his website, and were used to file $65 million in such returns.
The Justice Department stated in a press release: "Specifically, Ngo admitted that he offered access to PII (personally identifiable information) for 200 million U.S. citizens, and that more than 1,300 customers from around the world conducted more than three million "queries" through the third-party databases maintained on his websites."
