Topic
Court outcomes, custodial terms and ancillary orders arising from law enforcement investigations into online criminal networks.
Prasan Nepal, the 21-year-old who led the 764 child sextortion network, pleaded guilty Thursday and faces 15 to 30 years in prison. The Justice Department calls 764 a violent extremist network, but the count he admitted is conspiracy to commit sexual exploitation of a child.
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Daniel Rhyne got 32 months in federal prison for planting scheduled tasks on his industrial employer's domain controller that locked the firm out. Access to that one server let a single engineer delete or reset 318 accounts and change local administrator passwords on 3,538 machines.
Reality
Raheim Hamilton, co-creator of Empire Market, was sentenced to 40 years in prison for facilitating $430 million in illegal dark-web trade from 2018 to 2020. The published case rests on narcotics, and stolen credentials and hacking tools were a small part of what the site sold.
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MonsterCloud owner Zohar Pinhasi is charged with paying ransomware gangs over $8 million for keys while billing victims over $19 million. The charges turn on when the firm paid, so a recovery contract has to fix the order of steps and the source of any sample decryption.
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Former airmen Chijioke Timothy Odimegwu and Harafat Mogaji got a combined 189 months in federal prison for BEC scams that diverted a $1.68 million wire. Their scheme worked wherever a payer accepted new bank details on the strength of an email.
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Trung Nguyen Van faces a US money-laundering charge over crypto wallets that the DOJ says took in $53 million from fraud between 2018 and 2024. The trail was still good enough to charge him years later, and the department's own figures show the wallets forwarded nearly all of the money.
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Prosecutors in Kansas say the group crossed state lines to reach ATMs it believed were architecturally softer, which makes the machine on the street the control that mattered. The FBI counts 700 such incidents in 2025.
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Two years of extradition work and a guilty plea produced a four-year sentence for one Conti developer, measured against a group that hit more than 1,000 organizations and reappeared under new names.
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Karen Vardanyan was arrested in Kyiv in April 2025, extradited within two months, and sentenced this week to 24 months that run against custody already served. Prosecutors had argued that only meaningful sentences change a cybercriminal's math.
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Ahmed Hossam Eldin Elbadawy, 24, admitted his part in the group's extortion work a year ago. The plea reached the public record through filings seeking more than $17 million in cryptocurrency and luxury assets.
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Elbadawy is the third of the five people charged in 2024 to be convicted. Prosecutors want at least $17.6 million in cryptocurrency and cash out of a spree the indictment ties to 29 compromised victims.
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The Justice Department sentenced Oleksii Lytvynenko to four years over Conti, the ransomware the FBI ties to more than $150m in victim payouts as of January 2022 and to attacks in 47 states. Four others stand charged in the same district.
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A UK sentencing is the week's single security item measured in results rather than warnings, and the arithmetic is unflattering: 730 days of custody against 117 identified victims.
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