Man Convicted For Helping Thousands Steal Internet Access

angry tapir writes "An Oregon man has been convicted of seven courts of wire fraud for helping thousands of people steal Internet service. Ryan Harris, 26, of Redmond, Oregon, was convicted by a jury in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He faces a prison term of up to 20 years and a fine of up to $250,000 on each of the seven counts."

Comments

he got rich from fraud

[ozduo]

don't to the crime if you cant do the time

Re:he got rich from fraud

[MacGyver2210]

I would agree with you on that if corporate CEOs and pretty much everyone who makes over a million dollars a year hadn't set the precedent that defrauding thousands of people at a time comes only with a slap on the wrist and a meager fine despite a huge profit margin.

Shit, that's the definition of how corporate America works. Why aren't they jailing the CEOs of the cable companies instead for charging >5000 times the amount they pay for bandwidth for the average user? Why aren't they jailing the AT&T and Verizon execs for bait-and-switch with the 'Unlimited' plans which are actually limited to single-digit bandwidth amounts?

It's all ass-backward, and this guy just had the balls to do something about it. Do your time, but do it proudly.

Re:he got rich from fraud

[Richard_at_work]

Why aren't they jailing the CEOs of the cable companies instead for charging >5000 times the amount they pay for bandwidth for the average user?

Because thats neither fraud nor any other crime - its not illegal to not base your prices on your costs. The cable companies can charge what they like for their product.

Why aren't they jailing the AT&T and Verizon execs for bait-and-switch with the 'Unlimited' plans which are actually limited to single-digit bandwidth amounts?

Now that's a better example, and one I can't give an answer to.

It's all ass-backward, and this guy just had the balls to do something about it. Do your time, but do it proudly.

Sorry, but that's just a pathetic excuse for this guys actions, he didn't do anything justifiable or the be proud of.

Re:he got rich from fraud

[andsens]

don't to the crime if you cant do the time

I know, but 20 years?!?! Are they serious? That is an insane amount of time for a non-violent crime!

seven courts

[Anonymous Coward]

Courts are an odd unit to measure instances of wire fraud.

Re:seven courts

[Mitchell314]

Close, 1 Court ~ 0.1248859302 Libraries of Congress. The SI system never lines up nicely with the US's.

Re:seven courts

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

That typo was in the article, too. I'm not sure whether I should snobbily deride the editors for not correcting the mistake or fashionably praise Slashdot for finally reporting on a article accurately.

Bad design

[xenobyte]

If this guy could build a business, complete with websites, forums and so on, it must have gone on for quite a while (6 years it turns out), so it is obvious that:

1) The ISP didn't know enough about their business to realize the giant holes this guy was exploiting.
2) The ISP was incompetent enough to let this guy and his customers steal service (which the ISP's other customers paid for) for a long time.

Any sentencing here should include a heavy fine to the ISP for technical incompetence.

Re:Bad design

[SuricouRaven]

Worse, actually. He was impersonating modems using sniffed MAC addresses, which is only possible if the network is running without encryption - a feature that should be easily supported by DOCSIS (BPI has been in there since version 1.0), if the ISP were willing to fork out for the equipment. Coax is a shared medium, which means that every customer's data was being sent to every other customer on that segment, in cleartext - the only thing to stop someone from sniffing all the facebook accounts, emails, MMORPG logins and other non-SSL data they could desire would be the firewall in their modems, which is easily broken with a hacked firmware. That's a massive security worry right there - the ISP were lucky he only exploited it for theft of service, rather than sniffing all traffic and selling details to scammers who might use it for ID theft, spam and the looting of World of Warcraft accounts.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

not necessarily

[Weezul]

We should never outlaw creating tools like lockpicks, knives, cable modem sniffers, or CPUs able to run unsigned code. We should only outlaw specific usages of said tool.

A priori, there is nothing wrong with explaining how such tools work either, but aiding customers with the specifics of their particular cable provider could eventually cross the line into conspiracy to commit wire fraud, just like helping a robber a house's door would become conspiracy to commit robbery.

I therefore hope they convicted him on specific instances of technical support he provided which unambiguously made him a conspirator in specific customer's wire fraud. And I hope he wins back his freedom on appeal if they convicted him on any other grounds.

In fact, we should discuss the physical plans for equipment and software which he sold here because I'm sure we're curious what exactly he sold. Anyone got links to DIY kits? We should add this stuff to thepiratebay.se's physibles section : http://thepiratebay.se/blog/203

And what about the people on the end?

[Sycraft-fu]

Those that walked in to various loans, eyes wide shut? Or those who took loans they couldn't afford because they figured they'd just flip the house and make money?

The idea that individuals were completely blameless in the financial crisis is silly. Sure there were some people who were suckered in. They were told one thing and given another. For them I have some sympathy (though really, there's a standard loan terms sheet that comes with every loan, it isn't hard to read). However there were plenty that got greedy and just ignored all good sense.

An example would be my cousin, call him B. He owned a house that he'd had for quite some time, around 8-10 years on a 30 year fixed mortgage he could afford. then things went crazy and he decided he's take all his equity out in a refinance so that he could buy a bunch of new toys like a truck, take an expensive vacation, shit like that. His loan amount went way up because he was taking out more than the original loan had been for since his house was allegedly worth more. He couldn't afford a fixed loan at that rate so he got a cut rate ARM. Then prices crashed, the rate went up, and he lost his house. Not only should have he known better, my dad (among others) told him this was a stupid idea.

Then there's me, I have a house that I had since before things went crazy, on a 30 year fixed mortgage that I can afford. It supposedly doubled in value during the craziness. I could have taken a ton of money out. I didn't, because I knew that was a bad idea. I still have my house, and I can still afford my loan.

We were both in a similar situation, he chose one option, I chose another. Nobody held a gun to anyone's head and forced the issue.

The crisis was caused by failures and greed at so many levels. The government, the bond rating companies, the investors, the banks, the loan officers, and yes the individuals. You can't just act like a certain group were the evil ones who caused everything. There is a lot of blame to go around.

Now if you just want to start locking everyone up, I guess that's a valid position, but you might want to ask how well that's work in, say, the drug war.

Re:And what about the people on the end?

[ByOhTek]

The loan reps aren't exactly blameless either.

When I bought my places ($100k-$150k range), the first loan place I went to, the guy I talked to tried to convince me to get a more expensive house (you are approved for up to $350k! You should look at something nicer!)

I would *not* be able to pay the mortgage on such a house, let alone cover food and utilities. He didn't care, they were just going to sell the loan to some other company, they would make their money, he'd get his commission.

Glad I went with another company. That was obnoxious.

Re:And what about the people on the end?

[fearofcarpet]

He didn't care, they were just going to sell the loan to some other company, they would make their money, he'd get his commission.

You nicely summarized the root cause of the collapse of housing markets across the US. The banks thought that, by chopping up mortgages and combining them with other securities, the resulting CDOs had less risk because it was spread around and since the cost of each tranche was proportional to the risk, and therefore the yield, everyone understood the risks involved. Of course that created a profit motive to create as many mortgages as possible--and the riskier the better because the risk magically disappeared once sliced up and repackaged. Opportunists climbed into cheap suits and starting fly-by-night mortgage brokerages, assembling teams of sleazy salespeople to push bad loans. By the time the mortgages went sour, everyone involved in the transaction had taken their profit but, thanks to deregulated banking, those profits were basically paid out of the savings accounts of the very same people getting the bad mortgages. And since all the banks merged into giant mega-banks that snatched up bad debt with your money, they were "too big to fail." But don't worry, they bought "insurance" against it in the form of credit default swaps so that the government wouldn't have to bail them out. Except that the "insurance companies" were also banks and didn't have nearly enough cash to pay out, so the government bailed them out, including the third parties that were buying credit default swaps on CDOs that they didn't even own.

So everyone made money--from the mortgage bundlers all the way up to the CEOs of the giant banks--no matter if they succeeded, failed, or wrecked the global economy in the process. And to get the economy going again, the Fed started loaning out money at %0.01 interest so the banks could turn around and lend it back to Treasury at 3% (and pay back the bailout after dumping their bad assets); it's socialism for banks, and "free markets" and personal responsibility for the rest of us. Now we have a mountain of government debt and a generation of college-educated young people entering a stagnated economy with student loans accrued during the boom-times. I guess that is what happens when you create a system in which you can flip someone's livelihood for a profit without taking on any risk or responsibility.

...but this guy goes to jail for 20 years for scamming cable companies.

Meanwhile...

[Tasha26]

prison term of up to 20 years and a fine of up to US$250,000

...the real criminals in the banking and mortgage industry got away scoff free even after they caused damages in the trillions. Is the law blind?