Carder Pleads Guilty to Fraud Involving $36 Million in Losses

A hacker and carder has pleaded guilty to trafficking in more than half a
million stolen card numbers that resulted in $36 million in fraud losses.

Rogelio Hackett, Jr., 26, pleaded guilty Thursday in Virginia to one count
of access device fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft.

The hacker was arrested in 2009 for selling stolen bank card numbers in
online criminal forums and IRC chatrooms. When authorities searched his
home at the time, they found more than 675,000 stolen credit card numbers
on his computers and in e-mail accounts. According to court records
(.pdf), more than $36 million in fraudulent transactions have been
attributed to the stolen numbers found in Hackett?s possession.
Authorities don?t say how many of these transactions were committed by him
or by others.

Hackett, who hails from Lithonia, Georgia, admitted that he had been
hacking computers since the late 1990s, an activity that morphed into
hacking-for-profit by 2002 when he began stealing bank card data from SQL
databases. In August 2007, for example, he breached the server at an
unnamed online ticket seller and stole information on about 360,000 credit
card accounts. He still had the data on his computer two years later when
authorities searched his home.