Teenage hacker jailed over school bombs hoax

A TEENAGE hacker who forced schools in Bristol and other parts of the UK to evacuate after sending thousands of bomb hoax emails has been jailed.

George Duke-Cohan - pictured - sparked chaos with a mass hoax campaign in March.

The 19-year-old, from Watford, was arrested for the hoax just days later but in April, while under investigation by the National Crime Agency (NCA), sent further emails to schools in the UK and US claiming pipe bombs had been planted.

Up to 24,000 emails - spoofed to look like they had been sent by a gaming network - were sent to schools across the UK, including Bristol, London, Humberside and the North East.

NCA investigators, working with the FBI, also found that while on bail for the bomb hoaxes, Duke-Cohan had made a fake report of a hijacked US-bound plane.

Jailing him, Judge Richard Foster said: “You knew exactly what you were doing and why you were doing it, and you knew full well the havoc that would follow.

“You were playing a game for your own perverted sense of fun in full knowledge of the consequences.

“The scale of what you did was enormous.” His defence barrister said psychology experts had described DukeCohen as very immature, but the prosecution said he craved attention from followers on social media.

Marc Horsfall, senior investigating officer with the NCA, said Duke-Cohan had few real friends and spent “a great deal of his time online”.

The court heard Duke-Cohan had no previous convictions and lived with his mother and sister, but was linked to a cyber-hacker group on Twitter calling itself the Apophis Squad.

He was sentenced to one year in jail for the emails sent to schools and two years for the airport security scare. Judge Foster said that, for the purposes of sentencing, he accepted Duke-Cohan had autism spectrum disorder.