He escaped the worst. Sébastien Raoult, a young 23-year-old French hacker who was tried in the United States as part of a guilty plea procedure, was sentenced Tuesday to 3 years in prison by a federal judge in Seattle. This former computer science student from Epinal was also ordered to repay 5 million dollars. Taking into account his pre-trial detention in Morocco and Seattle, he should have 11 months left in prison.
Arrested in Morocco at the request of the FBI in May 2022, the Vosgien, who was accused of having been part of the French hacker gang ShinyHunters, specializing in the theft of data then resold on the dark Web, originally risked up to 116 years in prison.
After denying the alleged facts, Sébastien Raoult finally pleaded guilty to electronic fraud and aggravated identity theft. In exchange, seven other charges were dropped by the Justice Department, reducing the maximum sentence to 29 years. Before Judge Lasnik, the prosecutors finally requested 6 years in prison. The young Frenchman’s lawyers had asked for 25 months, a full minimum of two years in prison for identity theft, and one month for electronic fraud, recalling that their client was 19 years old at the time of the facts and that he was not a repeat offender.
6 million dollars in damage
Sébastien Raoult was arrested in May 2022 at Rabat airport, in Morocco, where he had just settled. He was pursued by American justice with two other French nationals, Gabriel Bildstein and Abdel-Hakim El-Ahmadi, who remained on French territory and were not extradited.
The three men were accused by American justice of having hacked the confidential data of more than 60 companies via phishing techniques, then of having then resold this data on the black market or negotiated ransoms.
According to the indictment, “they stole hundreds of thousands of customer files and caused losses to the companies estimated at more than six million dollars.”