A team of covert officers tracked the hacker named “Courvoisier” and while he was using the computer in the first class carriage on a train from Rhyl to London officers pounced on him, seizing the unlocked computer.

The arrest was captured on the train’s CCTV. On the laptop they found the financial information of more than 100,000 people.

The hacker (real name Grant West) operated out of a caravan in Kent, to attack the UK’s top companies, obtain personal and bank card details which he then sold on the dark web (i.e. to criminals over the Internet). Officers found approximately 78 million individual usernames and passwords and 63,000 credit and debit card details stored on an SD card in his caravan.

With the help of his girlfriend Rachael Bookes, he carried out cyber-attacks on up to 500 companies – including Sainsbury’s, Nectar, Groupon, AO.com, Ladbrokes, Coral Betting, Uber, Vitality, RS Feva Class Association 2017, Asda, the British Cardiovascular Society, Mighty Deals Limited, Truly Experiences Ltd, T Mobile, M R Porter, the Finnish Bitcoin exchange, and Argos.

In 2015, he managed to obtain the email addresses of 165,000 people and then sent a phishing email masquerading as Just Eat in an attempt to trick people into handing over their personal details, costing the company £200,000 to sort out.

The case is the first time the Met Police have seized criminal property in the form of cyber-currency.

He made at least 47,000 sales of data through the dark web, police said following a two-year investigation.

Case officer DC Helen Foster said the fraud came to light after a referral from Action Fraud who said customers from Just Eat had complained about a ‘phishing email’.

The emails, sent out to customers, purported to be a survey that would give the customer a £10 voucher to use on the site. But unsuspecting punters were handing over more of their personal details which West then sold on the Dark Web.

Once he had a complete set of customer details he would sell them on via the now-defunct online dark web market Alpha Bay.

Police say West made more than £180,000 from the scam. The proceeds from his business were converted into Bitcoins.

Well done the cops.

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