This Man Buys Riot Boss Personal Data On Dark Web, Uses His Credit Card For Crypto Mining Gets 1,400 ETH

Ethereum mining illustration. (Photo; WorldSpectrum - Pixabay)

JAKARTA – Ho Jun Jia, a man from Singapore who uses credit card data belonging to Marc Merril, the President of Riot Games. It is reported that Ho obtained Merril's personal data on a site containing illegal dark web content, then bought it. Ho utilizes Merril's credit card data for cryptocurrency mining activities.

For your information, Riot Games is the largest game company that has made a number of popular games including Valorant, Wild Rift, League of Legends, and so on. After obtaining the Riot Games boss' credit card data, the 32-year-old man used his identity to pay for Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud computing services and others. Ho then used the service for crypto mining.

Reporting from YahooNews, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) assessed that the theft of data belonging to the Riot boss took place from 2017 to 2018. The perpetrators began to access Merril's account by restoring American Express login access or log in recovery. In this way, Ho managed to take over Merril's account.

Then the thief redirected Merrill's e-mail to a new account that used a similar name to the previous account. Ho's actions did not stop there. He had to fake Merril's driver's license, then take his photo from the internet for Photoshop editing.

The action continued, Ho registered a new user account on AWS on November 3, 2017. The registration used Merril's stolen data. Ho is rumored to have used Merrill's credit card to pay AWS service bills of 5.2 million US dollars, equivalent to Rp. 74 billion.

One month later, the perpetrator made another multi-million dollar purchase of AWS services. The bill to Merrill's American Express credit card ultimately failed. Still adamant, Ho asked AWS to continue to provide its cloud computing services even though they couldn't pay.

On January 27, 2018, AWS froze the account registered by Ho after repeatedly sending e-mails containing billing payments and getting no response. In addition to being used for AWS, Ho also used Merril's credit card data to pay Google's cloud computing bill of US$ 250,000 or Rp. 3.5 billion.

By using cloud computing services from various large companies for crypto mining, Ho managed to get more than 1,400 Ethereum worth 818,000 US dollars to 2.1 million US dollars from November 2017 – March 2018.

Ho is also known to have sold 203 Ethereum, at that time worth 347,000 US dollars or Rp. 4.9 billion. He used the rest for personal use. In 2019, the Singapore police and DOJ conducted an investigation into the fraud scandal and ended up indicting Ho.

Due to this action, Ho was charged with violating the Computer Abuse and Cybersecurity Act in Singapore. So far, Ho has not received a sentence. The court will decide the verdict for him on April 20.