ATM ‘jackpotter’ sentenced to year in US prison
One of the men involved in an ATM jackpotting scheme in January this year is already facing punishment. A district court in Connecticut has sentenced Argenys Rodriguez to just over a year in prison, plus two years of supervised release and $121,355 in restitution, for collaborating on hacks that slipped malware into bank machines and forced the devices to spit out their cash. Rodriguez had pleaded guilty to bank fraud in June and will start his sentence on November 26th.
Fajin-Diaz, a Spanish citizen, has pleaded guilty as well has yet to face sentencing.
Jackpotting has been a recurring problem in Asia, Europe and Mexico, but it only recently reached the US despite the presence of similar ATM systems and malware that has proven effective for years. Rodriguez and Fajin-Diaz used a variant of Plotus, a strain of jackpotting malware that has been available in numerous forms since 2013 — they didn’t have to use any special tools to crack American machines. Until there’s a significant upgrade in ATM security, there’s a real chance you’ll see more of this going forward.
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