A 44-year-old man who hacked the bank accounts of the Eastern Cape education department and stealing almost R600,000 has been convicted of theft.
Bruce Owen was this week convicted in the East London Specialised Commercial Crime Court and sentenced to three years behind bars, without an option to pay a fine.
The provincial Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (known as the Hawks) said the theft took place in April 2010.
“The department discovered 14 fraudulent transactions of payments that were purportedly made to four different schools in the province,” Hawks spokesperson Warrant Officer Ndiphiwe Mhlakuvana said.
“The discrepancies were identified when complaints were lodged by rightful beneficiaries who did not receive their funds and the matter was reported to the Hawks for investigation.”
He said investigations by the Hawks revealed that Owen hacked into Basic Accounting System (BAS) system of the department, accessed information and lodged unauthorised payments into his bank accounts.
“This resulted to the financial loss of more than R600,000 from government department.”
Explaining how he carried out the theft, Mhlakuvana said Owen illegally obtained information through the use of key logger device designed to capture all the key keystrokes done on the computer keyboard.
“Once the information was captured by the key logger it was automatically saved on a memory device and was later used to hack into the system, utilising login credentials of the officials.”
Owen was only traced 10 years after the crime, and arrested in February 2020 in Gauteng.
“After four months of being remanded in custody, he was released on bail. He subsequently made several court appearances before his conviction and sentencing,” said Mhlakuvana.
The Provincial Head of the Hawks, Major General Mboiki Obed Ngwenya applauded the joint team for the sterling job in making sure that the accused received a proportional sentence.
IOL