Can someone please educate me on what the need for a "time served" sentence is? According to Wikipedia, this guy was (in part?) responsible for hacking Stratfor which resulted in a bunch of credit card fraud [1].
> [posted] stolen credit card data, one containing 3,956 items and the other with 13,191 items. Next they posted a set of over 30,000 items
> ...
> The hackers said they used the credit card data to make donations to various charities, including the Red Cross, Save the Children and CARE. However, one security expert stated that the charities will never receive the payments, claiming that instead, customers will report the fraudulent transaction, and the credit cards will return the money to the customer using a charge back. Ironically, this will most likely be a minus for those charities as they lose out on the fraudulent donations, along with the nominal bank service charge that customers typically must pay simply for processing/re-processing.
As someone whose VPS provider was "compromised" and a few weeks later had fraudulent transactions appeared on my credit card, it's stressful to be arbitrarily out of pocket $500 and then stressful/annoying to go through the chargeback process and get a new card and update your billing details everywhere.
This happened to my Cousin a year ago. A small donation to the PBS in NY. Oddly he was a PBS member but knew he wouldn't put any membership on the card that was charged.
Apparently these small donations are just used to check if a stolen cred card is valid.
> [posted] stolen credit card data, one containing 3,956 items and the other with 13,191 items. Next they posted a set of over 30,000 items
> ...
> The hackers said they used the credit card data to make donations to various charities, including the Red Cross, Save the Children and CARE. However, one security expert stated that the charities will never receive the payments, claiming that instead, customers will report the fraudulent transaction, and the credit cards will return the money to the customer using a charge back. Ironically, this will most likely be a minus for those charities as they lose out on the fraudulent donations, along with the nominal bank service charge that customers typically must pay simply for processing/re-processing.
As someone whose VPS provider was "compromised" and a few weeks later had fraudulent transactions appeared on my credit card, it's stressful to be arbitrarily out of pocket $500 and then stressful/annoying to go through the chargeback process and get a new card and update your billing details everywhere.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratfor#2011_hacking_incident