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Billionaire Being Charged With Hacking, Blackmail

Scams

from the didn't-have-enough? dept

Tue, Jan 31st 2006 11:42am — Mike Masnick
A UK heir to a fortune over a billion dollars is apparently now facing hacking and blackmail charges, along with a number of others. While plenty of computer crimes appear to be legal in the UK, "hacking into National Health Service computers to access confidential medical files to blackmail people, and spying on police and bugging their phone calls to get information" is still very much illegal, it appears. The article is a bit unclear as to Matthew Mellon's specific involvement in the crime, but he is appearing in court as a defendant associated with the case. Update: It looks like the original story was false and has since been removed. We've been alerted that the story was false, and we had noted originally that the story seemed quite vague and without specifics. It's not clear why UPI wrote the original story if it was not at all true. We apologize for any embarassment this caused, though, as bloggers, we can only rely on the source material which we used.
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4 Comments

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  • identicon
    Ben McNelly, 31 Jan 2006 @ 1:27pm

    No Subject Given

    Its not realy clear how involved he was in this whole thing... surely he can pay enough to get sombody to say he didn't know what they were doing.

    Sounds like they either have somthing legit on him specificaly, or they realy want too...

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 31 Jan 2006 @ 4:50pm

    No Subject Given

    When you have enough money to not worry about making more money, all you have to do is just stay the hell out of trouble. What an idiot!

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Me!, 31 Jan 2006 @ 11:54pm

    Moron

    Damn, what a freakin' moron! If he is an heir to billions of $, why didn't he just *pay* someone the get the information for him? That's what I would have done.

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      honico, 1 Feb 2006 @ 10:06pm

      Re: Moron

      --maybe that's the whole point i.e. paying someone to get some...greymarket?...info. The bobbi's/federalies must feel he doesn't have plausable deniability and as such someone was surely blackmailing him [First!]

      [ link to this | view in chronology ]


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