Scams

Scams

by Mike Masnick




Billionaire Being Charged With Hacking, Blackmail

from the didn't-have-enough? dept

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.

4 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
 

Reader Comments

(Flattened / Threaded)

    Jan 31st, 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...

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  • Jan 31st, 2006 @ 4:50pm
  • No Subject Given

    by Anonymous Coward

    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!

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  • Jan 31st, 2006 @ 11:54pm
  • Moron

    by Me!

    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.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

    • Feb 1st, 2006 @ 10:06pm
    • Re: Moron

      by honico

      --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!]

      (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

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