Filipino call center agent found guilty of hacking

A 22-year old former call center agent faces imprisonment after pleading guilty to charges of hacking into his company’s system to steal credit card information.

Jeffric Carlos Abiera was sentenced Thursday by the Quezon City metropolitan court to a minimum imprisonment of one to two years plus a fine of P100,000 ($5,858) in violation of section 33 of the E-Commerce Law.

According to a resolution filed by State Prosecutor Geronimo Sy, Abiera was able to break into the computer system of the credit card company affiliated with his former employer Sitel Philippines.

Abiera was able to gain access to a database maintained by Sitel’s sister firm in the United States and, using an internal IP address, proceeded to purchase goods online using various credit cards.

Fastnet Communications, a local company that operates e-commerce sites www.pinasgift.com and www.philgrocer.com, lodged a complaint before the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) after recording fraudulent credit card transactions from December last year to January, whose deliveries had a common recipient in a certain “Jeff Carlos” of San Juan, Metro Manila.

The orders were made using a single IP address, which was traced by the NBI to Sitel’s U.S. office. Sitel’s local office is located at the Eastwood Cyberzone in Libis, Quezon City.

A review of the workstation assigned to Abiera showed an internal IP address logged on to the phone adjacent to the computer at the time the orders were placed. He was also identified by a messenger from Fastnet as the one who received the initial two deliveries.

The NBI later on conducted an entrapment operation on the third delivery, which led to Abiera’s arrest.

According to the complaint sheet filed by FastNet, different orders amounting to more than $2,000 were traced to the particular IP address, using different credit cards but with the same recipient. These orders were subsequently cancelled upon the advice of FastNet’s third-party credit card processing company.

State Prosecutor Sy lauded the government’s second conviction of violations against RA 8792. The first one involved JJ Maria Gener, who was convicted for a similar violation last September after pleading guilty of hacking into government portal “gov.ph.”

“There are 25 more cases in the pipeline involving violations against E-Commerce Law,” he said in an interview.