Doctors deemed Kurtaj unfit to stand trial due to his acute autism so the jury was asked to determine whether or not he committed the alleged acts - not if he did so with criminal intent.
Despite having his laptop confiscated, Kurtaj managed to breach Rockstar, the company behind GTA, using an Amazon Firestick, his hotel TV and a mobile phone.
He broke into the company's internal Slack messaging system to declare "if Rockstar does not contact me on Telegram within 24 hours I will start releasing the source code".
He worked with Kurtaj and other members of Lapsus$ to hack tech giant Nvidia and phone company BT/EE and steal data before demanding a four million dollar ransom, which was not paid.
The gang - thought to mostly be teenagers - used con-man like tricks as well as computer hacking to gain access to multinational corporations such as Microsoft, the technology giant and digital banking group Revolut.
During their spree, the hackers regularly celebrated their crimes publicly and taunted victims on the social network app Telegram in English and Portuguese.
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I think the problem is that he said he'd likely turn to crime again.
If he'd just say "No, this was my last time, I'll be good now", he'd be in a different situation. Maybe doing exactly what you said after serving a much more reasonable sentence.
“I was able to get into your admin’s crypto wallet and steal $400,000”
“Holy crap! Good find. Can you document how you did that, and put the money back?”
“Lol, you think you can order Lapsus around? Money’s mine, life lesson: Secure it better. I’m going to leak your home address now.”
Typical case of judicial discrimination against autism. Autistic people get way harsher sentences for the same crime as they are considered a public safety threat by default. There was the case of a German autist who committed a simple robbery. You would think it would be handled as one, instead they had to overturn a court order which could have meant a life sentence without parole, if the mental asylum hospital would have deemed him by arbitrary rules unfit for society.
The judicial decision seemed to be based more around the fact that he was a danger to others, regardless of his own mental limitations. He re-hacked the company using a cell phone and a Fire TV stick when cut off from other devices. What else can they feasibly do? I sympathize with people who have special needs, but that doesn’t mean people should just live in fear of the ones that are a danger.
When the “victim” is lost money and leaked footage, I’m sure there’s limited sympathy, but I feel like these hackers are not so long from deciding to SWAT someone and very possibly getting people killed.