Romanian court gives e-mail hacker 4-year jail term
Print Edition
A Romanian court sentenced hacker “Guccifer,” who broke into the e-mails of former US President George W. Bush’s family, entertainment figures and the head of the Romanian secret service, to four years in jail yesterday.
Marcel Lazar Lehel, a cab driver by trade and known by his aliases “Guccifer” and “Small Fume,” was arrested in January in Bucharest and could spend a total of seven years behind bars as he also carries a previous three-year suspended sentence.
Guccifer shot to fame in 2013 after he hacked into the Bush family e-mails and posted artwork by the former US president, including self-portraits in the bathtub.
The same year, the hacker distributed emotional e-mails sent to former US Secretary of State Colin Powell from European Parliament member Corina Cretu, a Romanian, prompting Powell to deny that they had had an affair.
Guccifer also broke into a private Yahoo e-mail account of Romania’s secret service chief George Maior, which his agency said had been used before for academic correspondence.
“The aggrieved parties Corina Cretu and George Cristian Maior did not turn into civil claimants ... The defendant is obliged to pay 11,000 lei (US$3,400) in legal fees to the state,” the Bucharest court said on its website. It did not publish any details on his actions and said the sentence could be appealed.
An official at the Romanian general prosecutor’s office, who is familiar with the case but did not want to be named, said the office had no knowledge of any extradition request for Guccifer from the US.
No mention of the hacker’s activities in the US was made in court, the official added.
Guccifer claimed a wide range of victims and provided documents to support those claims to a US website, The Smoking Gun.
He used methods including guessing the answers to security questions to get access to customer accounts at Facebook, Comcast Corp, AOL Inc and other companies.
He has claimed his other victims include Tina Brown, the former editor of The New Yorker magazine, and “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes.
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