The Guimarães Court yesterday sentenced a 25-year-old Portuguese hacker-currently under house arrest in London, United Kingdom-to two years’ immediate custody. He was found to have run a computer platform that sold stolen personal and banking data, allowing him to obtain €275,000 between 2015 and 2022. The case concerned offences of unlawful access and improper access.
The defendant, Diogo Santos Coelho, was tried in his absence and received an aggregate sentence of two years and ten months. However, the panel of judges applied the "papal amnesty" law because he is under 30, meaning he will serve only two years. He was acquitted of criminal association and money laundering.
The judgment also orders the confiscation of the sum in favour of the State, on the basis that it was obtained unlawfully.
The court found that the defendant made money through a computer platform selling stolen personal and banking data-Raidforums-and then moved the proceeds from the website’s account to cryptoasset platforms and, from there, into an account at Banco Santander, "so that he would have funds available to use as needed". The offences were committed in Famalicão, where he lived, and the money was used to buy a house and a Tesla car.
Arrested at the FBI’s request
A native of Viseu, the defendant was arrested at an airport in England in 2022 at the request of the US FBI. In 2024, however, a judge at the High Court in London set aside the extradition, finding that he has autism and that he had been groomed into crime online by adults since the age of 14. In the United States, he could have faced a 52-year sentence. The Portuguese authorities want him to return, but the Americans continue to press for extradition.
In July 2018, the defendant posted an advert on the website offering an "official intermediary service". In exchange for a fee paid in cryptoassets, the site would allow "both buyers and sellers to complete their transactions after the contents of the files had been verified"-all of them stolen.
The scheme unravelled when an FBI officer in Virginia, USA, acting undercover, bought eight "RaidForums" credits and used them to obtain data from 3810 bank accounts, which then came under his control. Among them were 75 accounts belonging to individuals living in the local area. He carried out another similar operation to understand the method being used and to identify the person running the site: the young Diogo Santos Coelho.
The defendant also helped originate-without managing it-a business selling credit cards and personal data stolen from banks and travel agencies. The scheme totalled "several million".
Details
Biggest platform
Europol, the European policing agency, went so far as to describe the internet forum created by the teenager-he was only 19 at the time-as the "biggest hacker platform in the world".
Open regime
The defendant remains under house arrest, but on an open regime that allows him to go out to work. He sought to give evidence by video link at his trial in Portugal, but the UK justice system did not permit it.
Selling databases
The section of the site overseen by the defendant, called "Leaks Market", was described as a "place to buy and sell databases and data breaches".
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