A 22-year-old man who claimed to be a spokesman for a hacker group known as the “Turkish Crime Family” has pled guilty in London to attempting to blackmail Apple.
Bloomberg reports that back in March 2017, Kerem Albayrak claimed to have access to several million iCloud accounts and demanded that Apple pay him a ransom of $75,000 in cryptocurrencies. Albayrak threatened to reset a number of the accounts and make the database available online if Apple didn’t pay up. He later raised his demand to $100,000.
Apple said at the time that there had been no breaches of its systems. The U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) later said the data Albayrak claimed to have was from previously compromised third-party services which were mostly inactive, as Apple originally claimed.
Albayrak was branded as an attention seeker by a senior investigative officer at the NCA, saying in a statement that “it became clear that Albayrak was seeking fame and fortune.”
Albayrak won’t get any prison time, instead, he received a two-year suspended sentence following the NCA investigation. He is also subject to a six-month electronic curfew and will be required to complete 300 hours of unpaid work.
