A computer engineering graduate who instead chose crime will have to spend two years behind bars, having in his possession the personal data of nearly 500,000 people with the aim of committing fraud.
The State also seized a large sum of cryptocurrency from Lenz-Herby Pétion, valued at $1,082,765. More than half of his virtual currency wallet came from an illegal Russian darknet market specializing in counterfeit credit cards.
The 31-year-old man was sentenced to two years in prison less a day on Tuesday, having already pleaded guilty to a dozen charges of ATM fraud, receiving cryptocurrency, phishing and creating forgeries. documents.
Upon his release from prison, he will have to respect conditions specific to his crime, such as not using a computer except for legitimate work as well as not having bank documents or identity cards that are not valid. her name.
Lenz Pétion, fraudster
Evidence submitted to the Court
A computer whiz
“It’s a computer prodigy who chose crime,” described Me Alexandre Dubois, Crown prosecutor, last June at the Saint-Jérôme courthouse.
The Oregon Police Department launched the investigation against the Laval resident in November 2019. A company that sells ATMs then had 20 ATMs delivered to Laval and Montreal, before realizing that they had been paid with cloned credit cards. from Japan.
Alerted by the FBI, the Sûreté du Québec conducted a search of the suspect’s home, discovering his impressive Bitcoin portfolio. It was then “the largest confiscation and seizure of cryptocurrency, currently, in Canadian history,” according to prosecutor Me Dubois.
He owns the company Astracoin, specializing in bitcoin ATMs, which had different service points in the Montreal area, but several were difficult to access to the public.
In December 2020, a search took place in premises linked to Astracoins, a company in Lenz-Herby Pétion, on Boulevard des Laurentides, in Laval.
Pierre-Paul Poulin / Le Journal de Montréal / Agence QMI
Fake websites
By analyzing his computer equipment, the authorities also understood that the computer crack “carried out large-scale phishing internationally, particularly in the United States, in order to obtain credit card numbers and information names of the persons concerned,” indicates the summary of the facts.
To do this, he notably created fake financial institution sites. In just six months, it also recovered databases from several online businesses, including account data belonging to 493,786 people.
Lenz Pétion has the knowledge necessary for these crimes since he has a degree in computer engineering from Concordia University.