Tag Archive for: jail

UPDATE: Another Suspected Internet Scammer, Bamidele Muraina Bags 5Yrs In US Jail

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As the case of a suspected internet scamster, Raymond Abbas, aka Hushpuppi, lingers, a United States district judge, William M Ray II, Thursday sentenced Bamidele Muraina, a 34-year-old Nigerian hacker to five years and ten months in prison.

Muraina was sentenced for hacking into multiple tax preparation and accounting firms located in several states, including a Brunswick, Georgia-based accounting firm, between January 29, 2018, and April 2020.

However, Muraina fraudulently claimed unemployment insurance benefits worth $2.6 million.

In a statement issued by the United States department of justice, northern district of Georgia, obtained by Vanguard, Muraina was convicted alongside a 33-year-old Gabriel Kalembo.

Read the statement below:
 
Nigerian hacker and a repeat offender sentenced to federal prison for unemployment fraud and tax fraud scheme

“Bamidele Muraina, a Nigerian national who hacked into tax preparation firms and filed fraudulent unemployment benefit claims and tax returns using stolen personally identifiable information, and Gabriel Kalembo, a previously convicted fraudster who laundered the fraudulent assets, have been sentenced to federal prison.

“These defendants stole funds from programs meant to assist American workers and families seeking to make ends meet during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Kurt R. Erskine. “The collaborative efforts of our law enforcement partners were essential to disrupting a sophisticated network of criminals and bringing their leaders to justice.”

“The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating effect on us all. The enterprise created by these serial criminals further victimized our citizenry by robbing them of financial resources that were intended to help them,” said Special Agent in Charge Steven Baisel, U.S. Secret Service Atlanta Field Office. “Thanks to our judicial system, justice has been served.”

“Bamidele Muraina engaged in a conspiracy to defraud the Employment Security Department of Washington State (“ESD-WA”) by filing dozens of fraudulent unemployment insurance (UI) claims in the names of identity theft victims who were not entitled to such benefits. As part of the same conspiracy, Gabriel…

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Weapons, narcotic substances, mobile phones recovered from high-security Parappana Agrahara jail

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Bengaluru: In a surprise raid led by senior police officials here, a large number of weapons, narcotic substances, mobile phones and SIM cards were found in the high-security Parappana Agrahara jail on the outskirts of the city.

The raid was carried out by officers of the Central Crime Branch (CCB) in the wee hours of Saturday.

“The Central Crime Branch officers conduct a raid every three months in the prison and today’s was no different. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the cells of the prisoners had not been checked and thus a raid was carried out today. During the raid, sharp objects cut from utensils provided to the prisoners, a couple of mobile phones and SIM cards were found in their possession. We are investigating further,” said Ranganath.

“We will investigate whether the jail staff were involved,” he added.

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Hacker Risks Jail to Out Middlebury College Employee for Alleged Child Porn

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A hacker working for a security firm got the shock of their life last month when they stumbled across what appeared to be a Middlebury College employee’s stash of child pornography while hunting for vulnerable computers.



a close up of a keyboard: (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

© Provided by The Daily Beast
(Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

The hacker was faced with a moral quandary: alert law enforcement to their findings and risk criminal charges for hacking—or say nothing and live with a guilty conscience knowing a possible child abuser is on the prowl.

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But when they found a picture of the alleged voyeur’s driver’s license on his computer, they decided to take a chance with law enforcement and turn the man in, according to an affidavit obtained by The Daily Beast.

By doing so, the hacker revealed they had broken into the computer and had likely violated the law—but the gamble paid off.

Prosecutors eventually offered the hacker immunity for their cooperation, and the alleged voyeur, Scott I. Remick, a senior technology specialist for Middlebury College in Vermont, was arrested Wednesday for possessing child porn, according to court documents obtained by The Daily Beast. The court documents, unsealed late Wednesday, do not identify the security researcher, whose involvement is somewhat convoluted.

Upon finding the explicit images, the hacker, who was hunting for machines vulnerable to a specific kind of flaw as part of their work with a security research group, established backdoor access to Remick’s computer before handing off the case to law enforcement. They claimed they did so out of a fear that law enforcement officials might not be able to properly investigate the child pornography if they lost access to the trove of pornographic files.

Then, the hacker submitted a report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) that they observed Remick communicating with a young girl named “Jeanie” over a Tor network. The researcher told NCMEC they suspected Remick was either sharing explicit images with Jeanie or in a relationship with her, according to the affidavit.

“What I saw shook me to my core and I honestly could have never imagined being here in this position,” the…

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John McAfee, the Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Who Died in a Spanish Jail

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John McAfee

made a fortune estimated at more than $100 million from antivirus software for computers in the early 1990s and then pursued an increasingly bizarre life of adventure and run-ins with legal authorities in the U.S., Central America and Europe.

“My personality is such I can’t do something halfway,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2007. At the time, the entrepreneur was 61 years old and was then focused on his hobby of flying small, open-cockpit planes around the desert. Mr. McAfee’s legend continued to spread through his promotion of yoga and cryptocurrencies with unfiltered and sometimes sexually explicit and profanity-laden speech on social media and in interviews. He died Wednesday in a Spanish jail cell; authorities said his death was likely a suicide.

On Friday his wife,

Janice McAfee,

told reporters in Spain that John planned to appeal an extradition order to the U.S. in connection with federal tax-evasion charges, the Associated Press reported, and he told her Wednesday that “‘I love you and I will call you in the evening.’”

John David McAfee was born in England on Sept. 18, 1945, according to public records. He is widely reported to have been raised in Salem, Va., by an American father and a British mother.

A 2013 profile of him in Wired said his father worked as a road surveyor and his mother as a bank teller. The article quoted Mr. McAfee as saying his father was a heavy drinker and beat him and his mother severely. The father shot himself when John McAfee was 15, according to the Wired article, which quoted the software company founder as saying about his father: “Every relationship I have, he’s by my side; every mistrust, he is the negotiator of that mistrust.”

He graduated from Roanoke College in 1967 with a degree in mathematics. Over the next two decades, he worked for a variety of companies including

Lockheed Corp.

doing work involving computers and software. As a sideline, he operated a business called American Institute for Safe Sex Practices, one of several ventures that sold…

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