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Turkish court imposes 334-year sentence on credit card hacker

Online scammer Onur Kopek — already behind bars for 135 years — was recently handed a tack-on sentence of 199 years for selling 11 credit card records to other cybercriminals.

January 12, 2016

Don't look for credit card fraud to make a mass migration to Turkey anytime soon. In true "Midnight Express" style, a Turkish court recently sentenced 26-year-old credit card hacker Onur Kopçak to 135 years in prison — on top of the 199-year, seven-month, 10-day sentence the court handed down to the young fraudster in 2013 for a similar crime. 

According to the Turkish daily Sabah, the most recent court ruling stems from Kopçak's sale of 11 credit card records to other cybercriminals. His previous sentence was imposed as the result of 43 bank customer complaints of card data theft.

This contrasts with a 2012 case in which a U.K. court penalized Bulgarian national Leonid Rotaru with a suspended 18-month sentence after he confessed to skimming data and PIN numbers from 9,000 ATM cards with an estimated value of $5.25 million. This despite the fact that: a) he had already skipped bail in another jurisdiction; and b) he refused to name the organized crime bosses on whose behalf he committed his crimes.