A 26-year-old cyber-criminal has been handed down a 135-year sentence by a Turkish court for stealing the card details of just 11 people, taking his total mandated stint behind bars to over 300 years.
Onur Kopçak was slapped with the harsh sentence by Mersin third Criminal Court of General Jurisdiction, according to local media reports.
When added to his previous conviction—a 199-year sentence handed down back in 2013—it comes to a record-breaking 334 years behind bars.
Two years ago Kopçak was jailed for his part in a phishing operation designed to harvest the log-in details of banking customers by leading them to fake websites. He’s said to have been instrumental in designing the fake sites to look as realistic as possible.
Back then, it was the Criminal Court of Appeals that levied the sentence of 199 years, 7 months and 10 days after 43 banking customers complained their card details had been copied.
Although Kopçak has been described as a serial cyber-criminal—engaged in identity fraud, wire fraud, website forgery and more—the sentences handed down to him appear harsh compared to the kind of jail terms levied by many Western courts.
In 2010, for example, TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez received 20 years in a federal prison—the longest ever in the US—for his part in one of the largest data breaches ever recorded, compromising over 90 million records.
In the same year in the UK, gang leader Theogenes De Montford was caught with 35,000 stolen credit card details worth potentially as much as £35m at the time.
However, the 29-year-old software engineering graduate was sentenced to just four-and-a-half years for his part in the cloning operation.
Consumers are getting increasingly impatient, but not just at the sentencing guidelines of the English legal system.
After polling over 2,000 adults, endpoint security firm Bit9 + Carbon Black recently found that 59% want fines levied against firms that are breached if it’s found they’ve under-invested in security.
A small minority (7%) even called for jail time for the CISOs involved.
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