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Cyber crook gets over eight years for phishing racket

A Romanian immigrant in the US who has been running a sophisticated and lucrative phishing operation since he was 14 years old has been sentenced to eight and a half years in jail.

Sergiu D Popa, who is now 23, was behind the phishing scheme that illegally obtained financial data and sensitive personal information from thousands of people and also earned him thousands of dollars.

Victims received spammed emails purporting to be from the likes of SunTrust, Citibank and PayPal, which were sent out by the convict to lure them to rogue web pages where their details were stolen.

The young offender was sentenced at the US District Court in Minneapolis after admitting to have netted around $700,000 (£440,000) after stealing from about 7,000 people.

"Because there were so many victims who were hurt badly, the court believes the sentence is appropriate in order to protect the public," said sentencing judge John Tunheim.

Some 30 per cent of online banking customers in the UK do not know how to spot phishing scams, according to recent research from Money.co.uk.

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