Scots hacker in FBI sting jailed

A SCOTS businessman has been jailed in the US after he tried to sell information hacked from a rival to an FBI informant.

Kevin Forbes, who ran an oil industry recruitment firm, was arrested by federal agents moments after he demonstrated on his laptop how he had stolen the details of 450,000 oil workers from an unnamed competitor based in America.

Forbes, 34, of Aberdeen, has run the company oilandgaspeople.com since 2009.

He planned to use the stolen CVs – along with the identities of 800 businesses that used the rival website – to start a new online recruitment site.

Forbes tried to sell some of the hacked data to a businessman for £191,000. But his contact was actually a convicted fraudster who had agreed to help expose his scam in return for a lenient sentence.

A New York court heard how Forbes met the informant, who was accompanied by an undercover FBI agent, at a Manhattan hotel in February to discuss selling the data.

Forbes boasted of having 22 separate logins that allowed him to access the rival company’s website and download its data. The agent said he watched as the Scot used the credentials of an employee of the target company to log into its administrative page, bringing up CVs, subscribers and information uploaded by staff.

‘You can get into every client account,’ said Forbes, who was being secretly filmed. He was immediately arrested and spent 11 days in custody. He then pleaded guilty to a charge of fraud and related activity.

Escaping a five-year maximum sentence, Forbes was jailed for 18 months and ordered to pay £400,000 compensation to the other company.