Two men were charged for an elaborate hacking
scheme. They have been identified as Shahin Abdollahi, whose alias was
Sean Holdt, and Jeffrey Thomas Wilkinson. The two men hacked over 13
point-of-sale (POS) computers at a variety of Subways located in
Massachusetts, Wyoming, and California. This isn’t the first time
Subway’s been hacked. Last September, the franchise’s credit card
terminals were hacked at over 150 of its locations. It suffered $10
million in losses and 146,000 accounts were compromised.
Abdollahi and Wilkinson went through an elaborate scheme to execute
their plans. Abdollahi operated his own POS business, called “POS
Doctor”. There he sold POS computers to various Subways, and he
preloaded his LogMeIn (remote desktop tool) information into those
machines. In order to get a better understanding of how Subway and their
POS systems worked, he
operated a few of his own Subway franchises in
Southern California.
After learning how Subway operates and how they use their POS system,
he and Wilkinson then remotely accessed Subway’s POS systems to create
fake gift cards totaling up to $40,000. They took the fake gift cards
and sold them either on eBay, or Craigslist. According to the reports,
Abdollahi’s hacked systems were sold to a variety of other businesses
besides Subway as well.
The two men were charged with computer intrusion and wire fraud. It
seems like they did an awful lot of scheming and prep work just to
create fake gift cards. Abdollahi went through alot of hassle of owning
his own POS company and a few Subways just to get this plan into motion.
It’s speculated that Subway was just the testing grounds for an even
bigger scheme the two had planned.
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