The U.S. District Court in Seattle sentenced the member of the ShinyHunters hacker group Sebastien Raoult to three years in prison and ordered a restitution of $5 million.
In September 2023, Raoult pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, facing a maximum punishment of 27 years in prison.
Raoult, a French national, known online as ‘Sezyo Kaizen’ was part of the ShinyHunters hacking group. He was arrested in Morocco in 2022 and extradited to the U.S. in January 2023.
Between April 2020 and July 2021, Raoult and his co-conspirators caused financial damages exceeding $6 million, resulting from the theft of the personal information of millions of people and their sale on the dark web.
The hacker lured victims with specially crafted phishing pages that mimicked the login portals of their targets’ employers, tricking them into entering their account credentials and other sensitive data.
The group then used the stolen credentials to log in to company systems and steal all data they could access in the corporate network, cloud instances, and even systems of third-party service providers.
ShinyHunters used this corporate access to steal data from over 60 organizations, including personally identifiable information and financial details of millions of people.
The hackers also threatened to leak or sell that data on platforms like the RaidForums, EmpireMarket, and Exploit if the victimized company didn’t pay them a ransom.
In many cases, they even leaked data publicly to expose customers’ data and cause reputation and financial damage to the firms.
For over two years, Mr. Raoult participated in extensive computer hacking that caused millions of dollars in losses to victim companies and unmeasurable additional losses to hundreds of millions of individuals whose data was sold to other criminals. He sold hacked data, people’s cryptocurrency and even sold his hacking tools so that he could profit while other hackers attacked additional victims.
Raoult expressed repentance about his former activities, promising never to engage in hacking again.
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