Hacker accomplice gets five years prison

A United States federal court judge has sentenced to five years in prison one of the men who helped Albert Gonzalez steal more than 90 million credit and debit card numbers from TJX and other retailers.

Damon Patrick Toey had already pleaded guilty to the charges of selling the credit card data on behalf of Gonzalez and of helping him break into computer systems.

Toey, who was sentenced in federal court in Boston, will undergo three years of supervised release after serving his sentence, and was ordered to pay a $100,000 fine. He is the sixth US man to be sentenced for these hacking crimes.

Gonzalez was sentenced last month to two 20 year stretches in a federal prison.

The sentence was the longest ever for computer fraud in the US and, even with remission for good behaviour, Gonzalez, now 28, will be pushing 40 when he is released, since the two sentences will run concurrently.

The hackers are believed to have hacked wireless networks and corporate databases, selling their bounty of stolen credit card details to Russian criminals and also using the details to withdraw cash from ATMs, from their victims’ bank accounts.