Humza Zaman, a former Barclays Bank programmer was sentenced to four years in jail for helping the ‘TJX’ hacker Albert Gonzalez launder funds he gained through cyber crimes.
Zaman was sentenced to 46 months in jail and three years supervised release in addition to a US$75,000 fine by a court in Boston after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy in April 2009.
Zaman laundered between $600,000 and $800,000 for Gonzalez, who also pleaded guilty to a string of cyber-attacks on several firms, resulting in the theft of tens of millions of payment card details. According to the court papers, Gonzalez asked to be paid for card numbers in digital currency or by wire to a bank account in Latvia.
In November 2005 Zaman used ATM cards linked to accounts in the names of fictitious or unrelated individuals to withdraw and repatriate approximately $38,000 of Gonzalez’s Latvian funds. He then sent the money in cash, minus a cut, to the hacker in Miami.
During 2005 and 2006, Zaman went to California for Gonzalez on three occasions. He picked up between $50,000 and $370,000 from an unknown man and then shipped the cash to Gonzalez in Federal Express boxes after taking his cut. A similar process was carried out from New York.
In March 2008, Zaman sent Gonzalez logs from Barclays ATM systems, where he was working as a programmer. Although Gonzalez uploaded these logs to a Latvian server, there was no evidence that the data was used.
Gonzalez was sentenced to 20 years and one day (owing to the need to deal with the peculiarities in the USA sentencing statutes), after pleading guilty to many attacks on different companies which include Heartland Payment Systems and TJX.
The impact to Heartland Payment Systems was significant. It agreed to pay US$2.4 million to settle a consumer cardholder class action suit for losses suffered. It also paid US$1.5 million for the cost of notice to the settling class, and $0.76 million to cover the legal fees.
Heartland also agreed to a $3.6 million settlement with American Express. Its provision for expenses related to the massive data breach were US$73.3 million.
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