A COMPUTER hacker who robbed Royal Bank of Scotland customers of £6.3 million in the space of just 12 hours has been jailed for more than 11 years.
Sergei Tsurikov, 30, was part of a cyber crime gang who pulled off a massive sting by dispatching thieves using cloned debit cards to blitz more than 2,000 cash machines in 280 cities worldwide.
The attack in November 2008 was targeted at RBS's WorldPay payment processing division based in Atlanta, Georgia.
US prosecutors described it as "one of the most sophisticated and organised computer fraud attacks ever conducted."
Tsurikov, an Estonian who acted along with co-conspirators Viktor Pleshchuk and Oleg Covelin, both 32 - was tracked down a year later and extradited to America.
He admitted conspiracy to commit wire fraud and computer intrusion and has now been jailed for 11 years and three months.
He was also ordered to pay £5.2m in compensation to RBS by US district judge Steve C Jones in Atlanta.
The gang hacked into the bank's system to clone 44 debit cards and discover their PIN numbers. They electronically increased the available balances and deleted withdrawal limits on each card before distributing them to a network of foot soldiers, known as "cashers".
At the stroke of midnight US time, the cashers drained ATMs using the cloned cards. They struck at machines in the UK, America, Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan and Canada.
Pleschuk, from Russia, was given a suspended sentence for his part in the fraud, while Covelin remains at large.
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