Graduate who sold answers to exams caught by spelling error
A MASTERS student who hacked university computers to sell exam answers was caught out when several candidates made the same spelling mistake, a court heard.
Hayder Jasim, 29, received £20,000 from undergraduates he helped cheat at the University of South Wales, including one maths student who paid £6,500 for stolen answers, Cardiff Crown Court was told.
Jasim was sentenced to 20 months in prison after admitting three counts of obtaining articles by unauthorised access to computers and two counts of committing an act to impair reliability of data in computer.
The computer science student hacked computers without being detected for two years before he was rumbled by lecturer Liam Harris, who spotted five students had copied information from answer sheets only he had access to. The students copied a typing mistake contained in the answers.
The court heard Jasim roped in housemate, fellow student Noureldien Eltarki,
30, to find learners willing to pay for copies of exam papers and answer sheets. Eltarki was given a nine-month suspended sentence for his role in the scam.
Prosecutor Jim Davis said it “became obvious” to Mr Harris a number of students had answered questions by copying his own marking scheme and solutions. He said: “Five students had even copied typing mistakes from Mr Harris’s original working papers.”
The university established a “war room” to process 140 million log records to track the security breach before an IP address linked to a house where Jasim and Eltarki were both living, was identified.
Police seized computer equipment belonging to Jasim, including USB sticks and a laptop which contained “numerous files which matched those downloaded as part of the university breach”. Police also found £17,000 in cash in his digs.
Jasim used staff log-in details to access the network almost 700 times. The court heard the investigation and new security measures cost the university £100,000.
Judge Wynn Morgan told Jasim: “Your motive was financial greed.”