Hacker gets jail after victim dies of heart attack

A hacker was sentenced to six years in prison on Thursday for infringement of personal information which led to the death of a teenager in Shandong Province in August 2016, CCTV reported.

Du Tianyu was also fined 60,000 yuan, Luozhuang District People’s Court in Linyi City said.

Du hacked into the students’ information system of the college entrance examination in Shandong Province in April 2016 by planting Trojan horses and stealing more than 640,000 pieces of students’ personal information. Du sold over 100,000 pieces of that information to Chen Wenhui and earned 14,100 yuan (US$2,118), the court heard.

Chen then made over 10,000 phone calls to the students and swindled more than 200,000 yuan.

Xu Yuyu, a senior high school graduate from Linyi, was among the victims of the scam. She died of cardiac arrest in August 2016 after losing 9,900 yuan to the fraudsters, which she was supposed to use to pay her university tuition fees.

Chen was given a life sentence by the Intermediate People’s Court in Linyi in July while his six accomplices were given jail terms of three to 15 years.